
li HI JU U. J.., 





















.« ^<^^ 



\./ o- 






'«» J. ' 




'•M' 





















t •<>, 




^ <^* ♦ ^i^"- ^ A^ /^ 










^.' **^'*. 












.^^°- 



^* .^^-^^ 
































^^ 



< O 



» .^^^- 



THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY 

C3V7 

1% 



EMERSON'S ESSAYS 



*l 



The Modern Student's Library 

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 

By George Meredith. 
THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS. 

By William Makepeace Thackeray. 
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. 

By Thomas Hardy. 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 
ADAM BEDE. 

By George Eliot. 
ENGLISH POETS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY. 
THE RING AND THE BOOK. 

By Robert Browning. 
PAST AND PRESENT. 

By Thomas Carlyle. 
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. 

By Jane Austen. 
THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN. 

By Sir Walter Scott. 
THE SCARLET LETTER. 

By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
THE ESSAYS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVEN- 
SON. 
NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. 
THE ESSAYS OF ADDISON AND STEELE. 
SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF 

BENJAMIN FR.ANKLIN AND JONATHAN 

EDWARDS 
SELECTIONS AND ESSAYS. 

By John Ruskin. 
SELECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH WALDO 

EMERSON. 
AN ESSAY ON COMEDY. 

Bv George Meredith. 
THE ESSx\YS OF FRANCIS BACON. 
Each small i2mo. 
Other volumes in preparation. 



.^-^^^fp^ 



THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY 



EMERSON'S ESSAYS 
I 



SELECTED AND EDITED WITH AN 
INTRODUCTION BY 

ARTHUR HOBSON QUINN 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND DEAN OF THE 
COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



fc 



I 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 



^''Q'5 

y %^^^ 



Copyright, 1920, by 
CHAKLES SORIBNER'S SONS 



©CI.A597144 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction ix 

From Nature, Addresses and Lectures 

Nature (1836) ...... 1 

The American Scholar (1837) .... 39 

From the Essays, First Series (1841) 

History 57 

Self-Reliance . . . . . . .77 

Spiritual Laws 101 

Friendship 120 

Heroism 135 

The Over-Soul . 146 

From the Essays, Second Series (1844) 

Character 162 

Manners .177 

Politics 197 

New England Reformers 210 

From Representative Men (1850) 

Shakspeare ; or, the Poet 229 

Napoleon ; or, the Man of the World . . . 245 

From English Traits (1856) 

Ability . . .264 

Character 278 

Wealth .287 



INTRODUCTION 

Among the shifting values in our literary history, Emerson 

tands secure. As a people we are prone rather to under- 

bstimate our native writers in relation to English and conti- 

aental authors, but even among those who have been content 

|fco treat our literature as a by-product of British letters, 

Ijmerson^s significance has become only more apparent with 

time. He moves into the circle of those who are realities, 

not by reason of any detachment from his native conditions, 

but because of that intense idealism which flowers best in the 

soil from which he drew his inspiration, the soil which he 

always left with regret and to which he ever returned with 

satisfaction. 

He was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, of a stock which 
held high standards of conduct both for themselves and 
others. On both sides he was descended from clerical 
ancestors who were ornaments of that theocracy of New 
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in 
which an admiring congregation took the color of its thought 
from its minister, and in return demanded of him that he 
know how to think. His father, William Emerson, was a 
clergyman of the transition to Unitarianism, and his mother, 
Ruth Haskins, was of a stoical fibre that made her lie all 
night with a broken hip rather than disturb the household 
routine. She needed all her courage, for her husband died 
in 1811, leaving her with five boys to bring up, of whom one 
was mentally defective. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the second of the five. He 
was not particularly distinguished at the Boston Latin 
School or at Harvard College, from which he graduated in 
1821. He had been learning during this period frugality 
and industry and the other lessons that came naturally to a 



J 



X INTRODUCTION 

boy in a family which had Uttle money, but which insisted 
upon education as a matter of course and in which each 
brother, as it came his turn, helped the younger ones to their 
birthright. Emerson was not a man set apart from the be- 
ginning as a prophet and a lonely soul. He did not make 
many friends, it is true, but his Journals show that at college 
he was simply one of many, belonging to the usual college 
societies, and not recognized by his fellows as one especially 
worthy of reverence. The minutes of the P3rfchologian Club 
for November 18, 1820, state 'Hhat although Br. Emerson 
was prepared to read the Essay due from him . . . such 
was their desire to depart that it was found impossible to 
keep them together any longer. '^ 

Emerson taught school for a while after graduation in 
Boston and Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and was admitted 
to the ministry of the Unitarian Church in 1826. A period 
of ill health followed, but in 1829 he was ordained as the 
colleague of the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr. in the Second 
Church of Boston and after his marriage in the same year to 
Ellen Louisa Tucker, his future seemed assured in pleasant 
places. But even in the anticipation of his happiness, we 
find him writing to his Aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a woman 
of sterling character, who was a great influence in his life, — 

^^ Waldo is comparatively well and comparatively success- 
ful . . . and I straightway say, can this hold? . . . There's 
an apprehension of reverse always arising from success. '' ^ 

That apprehension was soon realized. In 1832 his wife 
died of tuberculosis, and on September 9, 1832, he resigned 
from his pastorate because he declined to administer the 
Lord's Supper. The sermon which he preached on this 
occasion, now printed in the Miscellanies, and the references 
through the earlier Journals, are significant as showing 
Emerson's change in attitude toward the ministry and its 
functions. In the beginning he refers to his ^^ vocation," and 
wonders whether he is fit for it; later it becomes his ^'pro- 
fession" and he speculates on his chance of success in it. 
When he sums up his reasons for objecting to the Communion 
service he says ''I have no hostility to this institution: I 
am only stating my want of sj^mpathy with it. . . . That is 
the end of my opposition, that I am not interested in it." ^ it 

1 Journals, Vol. 2. p. 259. 

2 "The Lord's Supper," in Miscellanies, p. 24, Centenary Ed. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

is as though a physician were retiring from practice because 
he no longer was '^interested'' in the circulation of the blood 
or a lawyer because he was '' interested " no longer in the Con- 
stitution of the United States. There is perhaps nothing 
he ever said that showed more definitely his limitations, just 
as the act itself showed his courage and his independence. 

On December 25, 1832, he sailed for Europe, landing at 
Malta, and he visited Italy, France, and England. On this 
visit he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Landor, and laid 
the foundation of his long friendship with Carlyle. He 
records his impression that ''not one of these is a mind of 
the very first class," and he rejoiced when in October, 1833, 
he was once more in the United States. "Travelling," he 
says in "Self -Reliance," "is a fool's paradise." Emerson 
believed that any one who did not carry inspiration within 
himseK could obtain little from historic associations. To use 
his own phrase, such a one "carries ruins to ruins." 

In 1834 we find him preaching and lecturing, with his 
headquarters at Concord, in the Old Manse, afterward Haw- 
thorne's residence. In September, 1835, he married Lydia 
Jackson, of Plj^mouth, and brought her home to the house he 
had purchased in Concord, in which they lived during the 
rest of their lives. It was never a pretentious house, but 
even as it stands to-day after the rebuilding consequent upon 
the fire of 1872, it gives an appearance of comfort to the 
passerby on the Cambridge Turnpike. Emerson may now 
be said to have begun his permanent mode of living. He 
had an income by inheritance from his first wife, which 
brought him about twelve hundred dollars a year. He added 
to this his lecturing fees which varied greatly but probably 
did not exceed in any year eight hundred dollars. In later 
years there was, of course, some income from his books. 
What Emerson valued most in this manner of life was its 
independence. He was free to think and to write. By his 
own action he had shut himself out of the profession for which 
he had been trained, but this action gave him the opportunity 
to take up his real vocation, the stimulation of the mind of 
his readers and hearers. Curiously he cherished all his life 
the hope that he would be called to a chair of rhetoric and 
oratory in a college. It is interesting to speculate upon the 
kind of a professor he would have been, but there can be no 
regret on our part that the offer never came. 



xii INTRODUCTION 

His creative period had already commenced. In 1836 he 
pubUshed the first essay on ^'Nature/' which he had begun 
in 1834 and nearly all of which had been written in the Old 
Manse. It is one of the most significant of his essays, for 
on the first page he shows the independent soul who is bound 
by no tradition. ^'Let us demand our own works and laws 
and worship.^' Soon we are introduced to the Emerson 
method of generalization. '^Miller owns this field, Locke 
that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them 
owns the landscape.'' A few particular statements, then a 
generalization. No trouble seems to have been taken to j 
round off the corners, or to make things fit. But when the I 
conclusion is a real one, these apparently disconnected ideas ! 
cause one to stop and think as no other writer of his day has j 
the power to do. Reading Emerson is not like entering the j 
fresh air — it is rather Uke entering a room highly charged i 
with oxygen. • j 

In '^ Nature,'' the doctrine of the Over-soul is first presented. 
''The currents of the invisible being circulate through me. 
I am part or parcel of God." This theme, of the Divine Mind, 
animating all creation, unifjdng it, sinking thereby all distinc- 
tions of a minor kind, is one to which he returns again and | 
again. Stated first in '^ Nature" it forms the topic of ''The 
Over-soul," and it reappears in itself or in its amphfication I 
throughout his work until, in "The Natural History of the | 
Intellect," it becomes the attempted basis of a philosophy. ; 
The idea is, of course, not a new one. But it is the form in ' 
which Emerson expresses the theme that is important. When 
he defines the~ Over-soul as "the soul of the whole ; the wise 
silence ; the universal beauty, to which every part and i 
particle is equally related; the eternal One," or when he; 
tells us that "I dare not deal with this element in its ; 
pure essence. It is too rare for the wings of words," we see : 
the poet and the philosopher combining to create or to adapt \ 
the inevitable phrase. It was most fitting that on Emerson's | 
tomb were cut the Hnes, from "The Problem " : j 

"The passive master lent his hand i 

To the vast soul that o'er him planned" 

for they express the doctrine which he spent his life in ex- 
pounding in verse and prose. In "Woodnotes" where we 
are told to 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

** Leave all thy pedant lore apart 
God hid the whole world in thy heart '^ 

in the essay on ^^Love/' where the final thought is that of 
the supremacy of the one Eternal Love over all earthly finite 
love, the same idea is presented. 

This idea of the Over-soul was one of the ties that bound 
Emerson to the Transcendental movement in our literature 
and our philosophy. He was by nature attracted to this 
way of thinking and it is not necessary to wander far into the 
purlieus of German philosophy to find the origins of his 
transcendentalism. The opposition to the sensualistic phi- 
losophy of the eighteenth century is shown already in 1821 
when in his prize essay on ^^The Present State of Ethical 
Philosophy '^ ^ he speaks of the moral faculty as ^^an intuition 
by which we directly determine the merit or demerit of 
action." The doctrine of the superiority of intuition to 
experience was, therefore, in his mind before he turned his 
attention to German thought. Whether he derived it from 
Ethan Allen, as he might have done, or from other native 
sources, need not concern us here. He contributed to the 
Transcendental movement his interest and support. He 
belonged to the group known by those outside of it as the 
^'Transcendental Club" which began to meet in 1836, and 
which included in its variable list such men and women as 
Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, Margaret 
Fuller, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William 
Henry Channing, and others. He was glad to discuss with 
them the problems, ethical and spiritual, which were brought 
into their meetings, and he gave much strength and time to 
the editorship of The Dial^ the journal of the movement, 
from 1842 to 1844. Twenty-three poems and fifty-five 
prose articles were contributed by him to The Dial, and he 
lost financially by the enterprise. But he did not enter 
Brook Farm, the communistic experiment that grew out of 
the dehberations of the Transcendental Club. In 1842 he 
could even criticize the movement in his address on '^The 
Transcendentalist " in Boston. It was the individuahstic 
note, not the communistic, that appealed to him in 
Transcendentalism. 

1 E. E. Hale. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Together with Two Early 
Essays of Emerson. Boston, 1902, pp. 95-135. 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

Naturally connected with the idea of an Over-soul were 
the relations of the supreme mind to the individual mind and 
the relations of the individual to Nature. The unity and 
supremacy of Nature is expressed effectively in ^'Spiritual 
Laws/^ 

'^Nature will not have us fret and fume — When we come 
out of the caucus or the bank or the Abolition convention, 
or the Temperance meeting or the Transcendental Club — 
into the fields and woods, she says to us, ^So hot? my little 
Sir?'^^ 

Emerson^s panacea for the evils of the world lay in the 
reconnection of the individual with Nature. In his essay on 
^^ The Poet'; he says: 

^^For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of 
God that makes things ugly, the poet, who reattaches things 
to nature and the whole, — disposes very easily of the most 
disagreeable facts.'' 

Again, in the essay on '^Nature" of 1844, he says that 
Nature is the circumstance that '^ dwarfs every other circum- 
stance and judges like a god all men that come to her." Yet 
■he acknowledges later that ^Hhe beauty of nature must 
always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has 
human figures that are as good as itself," and he admits that 
the '^fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway." 

Emerson was no hermit. He did not believe in removing 
himself mechanically from society but he insisted on pre- 
serving his spiritual independence. In his Journal for 1858 
we find an illuminating criticism of Thoreau which he con- 
cludes by questioning whether Thoreau has not found it 
wasteful and foolish ^Ho spend a tenth or a twentieth of his 
active life with a muskrat or fried fishes. I tell him that man 
was not made to live in a swamp but a frog. If God meant 
him to live in a swamp, he would have made him a frog." ^ 

The supremacy of the primal mind emphasizes rather than 
diminishes the importance of the individual. Inasmuch as 
the primal mind manifests itself in the individual mind, each 
individual mind is competent to judge for itself because it 
cannot go contrary to its own standards, and, therefore, it 
must be right. 

Of all Emerson's major topics, it is this idea of the impor- 
tance of the individual that he stresses most. It forms the 

1 Journals, Vol. 9, p. 153. 



h 



INTRODUCTION xv 

keynote of the essays on '^SeK-Reliance^' and ^^ Character^'; 
it colors his conception of ^'History''; it establishes his 
standards in ^^ Manners ''; it determines the quality of his 
^' Heroism^'; it underlies his political philosophy in ^'Poli- 
ties'' and ''New England Reformers.'' It also determines 
the selection of his topics in Representative Men, In the 
essay on "History" he says, "Every reform was once a 
private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again 
it will solve the problem of the age." 

The great lesson of " SeK-Reliance " is to be original, to 
speak one's own thoughts, so that we shall not have to take 
our opinions from another. In fact he carried this dislike 
for conformity, and consistency still further. He believed in 
being independent of one's self : — 

"With consistency a great soul has nothing to do. He 
may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 
Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow 
speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it 
contradict everything you said to-day." 

He believed that even fashion would yield to the self-reliant 
man and that if all classes were destroyed until only two men 
were left, one of these would be the leader. It is the heroic, 
the independent quality, and the surety that appeal to him 
even in good manners. His description of the personality 
of the charming woman is tinged with this thought when he 
described the Persian Lilla : " She did not study the Persian 
grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems 
of the seven seemed to be written upon her." 

Another of the fundamental principles which Emerson 
endeavors to establish is idealism. He uses the word both 
in its popular and its philosophic senses. In his first essay 
on "Nature" he defines Idealism in the Platonic manner and 
teaches that the world must remain ideal because the veracity 
of the senses cannot be tried. He shows, too, the limitations 
of the ideal theory and the barrier it puts up between the 
mind and the outside world. It solves only the question 
— What is matter ? It does not solve the problems — whence 
is it ? and whereto ? Emerson tries to show that spirit creates 
matter, but even he does not try to answer the third question. 
In fact his Puritan inheritance struggled hard against the 
purely ideal theory of nature, as we see in his essay on "Ex- 
perience" ; and although he decides finally against the argu- 



xvi INTRODUCTION 'i 

ment from experience, we feel that his philosophic system was'j 
only in the making. I 

Ideals were rather to be striven for than idealism. And] 
ideals when they were found were of little worth unless they;] 
were made practical. In the purely abstract conception of j 
idealism that emanated from Germany he had little interest. \ 
He took it mainly through Carlyle and Coleridge and by the ' 
time it had passed through the practical moral digestion of 
the British philosophers it became better suited to his Newl| 
England consciousness. In ^^ Circles'^ we find his gospel: j 

''There are degrees in ideahsm. We learn first to play 
with it academically. . . . Then we see in the heyday of 
youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in 
gleams and fragments. Then its coimtenance waxes stem 
and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now shows 
itseK ethical and practical. We learn that God is : that he 
is in me ; and that all things are shadows of him.'^ 

The practical quality of his idealism is shown in such an 
essay as ''New England Reformers.'' He did not believe 
sincerely in reforms unless the reformation was one of char- 
acter, and he warns us against being in a hurry to reform one 
thing, preferring to reform the basis and let the result come. 
The best union he felt was one of isolated individuals because 
it was likely to be more spiritual. He had no sympathy with 
the rather wild theories and vagaries of his day, and he took 
no part in them. He had a personal admiration, however, 
for a sincere reformer who was making a sacrifice for a great 
cause. He befriended Harriet Martineau and John Brown, 
and he even went so far as to take part in the free soil campaign 
for James G. Palfrey in 1851. Abohtion of slavery was the 
one great reform to which he devoted his energy, and he never 
refused an opportunity to speak or write in favor of freedom. 

It was this practical good sense which marked him out 
from among the more radical of his friends, with whom he 
associated freely, but whom he resolutely declined to follow 
to their various extremities. Above all his other quahties, 
perhaps, was Emerson's ability to think clearly, and his calm 
sense of proportion was offended by the inability to distin- 
guish between a proper independence and the extreme | 
individualism which would destroy the very organization of | 
the State. In his Journal for 1845 ^ he says : i 

HT 1 P. 18. \ 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

*^ The State is our neighbors ; our neighbors are the State. 
It is a folly to treat the State as if it were some individual, 
arbitrarily^ willing thus and so. . . . God and the nature of 
things imposes the tax, requires that the land shall bear its 
burden, of road and of social order, and defence, and I 
confess I lose all respect for this tedious denouncing of the 
State by idlers who rot in indolence, selfishness, and envy in 
the chimney corner.'^ 

Later he adds : ^^ Don't run amuck against the world. Have 
a good case to try the question on. It is the part of a fanatic 
to fight out a revolution on the shape of a hat or surplice . . . 
or altar rails, or fish on Friday. As long as the State means 
you well, do not refuse your pistareen . . . ninety parts of 
the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good : 
ten parts for mischief. . . . Your objection, then, to the 
State of Massachusetts is deceptive. Your true quarrel is 
with the state of Man.'' ^ 

Emerson's social philosophy was also of a practical kind. 
He participated in the township organization and he had no 
patience with the extreme individualism of Alcott and 
Thoreau. He expressed himself quite frankly about these 
friends in his Journal in 1842. Of Alcott, he says : 

^•'It must be conceded that it is speculation which he loves 
and not action. Therefore, he dissatisfies everybody and 
disgusts many. ... He has no vocation to labor, and 
though he strenuously preached it for a time, and made 
some efforts to practise it, he soon found he had no genius 
for it, and that it was a cruel waste of his time. It depressed 
his spirits even to tears." 

This passage was written before Alcott took his family to 
Fruitlands, lost all his venture by incompetence and then 
weakly took to his bed and determined to die. It would 
seem as though Emerson had some foreknowledge of the 
essential flaw in Alcott's character for he concludes his analy- 
sis by the pithy sentence, ^^I do not want any more such 
persons to exist." The son of Ruth Haskins had no sym- 
pathy with any one who, while speculating upon the rights 
of the individual, lost his sense of the duty he owed to others. 

These six great topics — the supremacy of the Infinite 
Mind or Over-soul; its relations with the individual; the 
unity and supremacy of Nature ; the independence of the 

1 Journals, Vol. 7, p. 221. 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

individual; the necessity of following one^s ideals and the, 
importance of making ideals practical when they have been 
found — form the groundwork of the earliest and most 
significant of the essays of Emerson. The First Series 
of these was published in 1841, the Second Series in 1844, 
and in 1849 some of the earher addresses were combined, 
together with '^ Nature,'^ in a volume called Nature, Addresses 
and Lectures. While Emerson did not merely repeat himself 
in his later essays, which were published during his life time 
under the titles, The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and 
Solitude (1870), Letters and Social Aims (1876), there is no 
doubt that they, together with the volumes pubhshed 
posthumously, are to a great extent ampHfications of his 
earlier work. It is, therefore, in these three first volumes < 
and in his treatment of more concrete themes in Representor- i 
live Men and English Traits that we must look for his most ] 
significant work. ^ i 

Representative Men was published in 1850. It was natural \ 
that Emerson should have written a book which is a celebra- 
tion of personality. To him all history was a chronicle of i 
the deeds of great men, and like Carlyle he had an aristo- 
cratic and not a democratic conception of the progress of 
the race. But it is interesting to compare their selection of 
great men in Heroes and Hero Worship and in Representative \ 
Men. Carlyle chose Odin, the divinity, Mahomet, the ' 
prophet, Dante and Shakespeare as poets, Luther and Knox 
as priests, Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns as men of letters, \ 
Cromwell and Napoleon as kings. Emerson selected Plato 
as philosopher, Swedenborg as mystic, Montaigne as sceptic, ; 
Shakespeare as poet. Napoleon as man of the world, and ; 
Goethe as writer. Shakespeare and Napoleon are in both ; 
lists, but Napoleon is chosen as a king by Carlyle and as a i 
representative of the middle class by Emerson. Emerson^s ; 
aristocracy was intellectual ; politically he was a theoretical 
democrat. In the ^'hero as king'^ he had little interest, he 
liked strong men ''who stand for facts and for thoughts.'' ; 
In the introductory chapter on ''Uses of Great Men,'' he ! 
says : ' 

"I like the first Caesar; and Charles V of Spain; and i 
Charles XII of Sweden ; Richard Plantagenet ; and Bona- i 
parte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal i 
to his office. ... But I find him greater when he can abolish ; 



INTRODUCTION xix 

himself and all heroes by letting in this element of reason, 
irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward 
force, into our thought, destroying individualism ; the power 
so great that the potentate is nothing/' 

It will be noticed that Emerson avoided the hero as priest 
and prophet and divinity; the hero who is inspired by a 
faith or belief in a great cause is not one of his representative 
men. The type of hero represented by Joan of Arc or 
Columbus is rarely even mentioned in his essays. The 
quality which attracted Emerson in his representative men 
was their originality, their self-reliance. ^'He is great," he 
says, ^' who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds 
us of others. '' 

It is interesting to see his two lists, given in his Journal 
for 1849 : ^ 

"Big-endians Little-endians 

Plato Alcott 

Swedenborg Very 

Shakspeare Newcomb 

Montaigne Channing 

Goethe R. W. E. 

Napoleon Thoreau ' ' 

Of his hst of ^^Little-endians,'' Jones Very, the sonneteer, 
and William EUery Channing, the younger, are known only 
to the special student of our poetry, and Charles Newcomb is 
utterly forgotten. What led Emerson to make the compari- 
son is not quite clear unless it was to strengthen his own 
judgment of the wisdom of his selections by concrete 
comparison. 

The essay on Shakespeare is not only the greatest of 
the volume b\it it also illustrates his method as a Hterary 
critic. He is not in any sense an historian of literature, he 
had not the impulse to pursue facts and make significant 
classifications. But he could interpret, he could analyze, and 
occasionally he could give us constructive criticism. From 
the vast mass of textual scholarship of Teutonic origin which 
has blurred our vision of Shakespeare, lovers of our great 
English poet will forever turn to that famous passage which 
ends : *^ What king has he not taught state. . . . What maiden 

1 P. 62. 



XX INTRODUCTION 

has not found him finer than her dehcacy? What lover has 
he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What 
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his 
behaviour ?'' 

Emerson does not hesitate to criticize his representative 
men unfavorably. He disliked Swedenborg's symbolism. 
Napoleon he judges finally on the basis of his lack of con- 
science. The defects of Plato are, first, that he is literary, 
and, therefore, he has not the influence, the vital authority 
that less learned prophets have had ; second, that he has no 
system — he attempted a theory of the universe and the 
theory is not complete or seh-evident. He has said one thing 
in one place, and has contradicted it elsewhere. This criti- 
cism of Plato is interesting because it comprehends just the 
defects which mar Emerson's own philosophy. 

English Traits, which appeared in 1856, reflected his judg- 
ment of his mother country after two visits to her. The 
first was in 1833 in search of health ; and the second, in 1847 
and '48, was the result of invitations to lecture from a union 
of certain Mechanics' Institutes. He landed on October 
22, 1847, at Liverpool and paid his first visit to Carlyle in 
London. He had ample opportunity to see both literar}^ and 
social life in England and we find him recording with keen 
appreciation in his Journal, the clever talk at Samuel Rogers' 
table. He seems not to have avoided meeting people, as 
Hawthorne did, and w^hile his actual time in England was 
shorter than that spent by Irving, Willis, or Ha^vthorne, he 
has given us surely an account of English character that is 
excelled by none of these other American writers upon 
England of his own day. If there is not the general sympathy 
with Enghsh country life that we find in Bracehridge Hall, 
or the appreciation of the English house party so apparent 
in P enduing s by the Way, or the sense of the picturesque 
that struggles through the general depression of Our Old 
Home, we find a penetration beneath the surface, an under- 
standing of the strength and the weakness of English charac- 
ter, an appreciation of moral and ethical values, and above 
all a judicial attitude, that makes it unsurpassed as an exposi- 
tion of England of that day to America. 

On leaving he wrote to Margaret Fuller: '^I leave England 
with an increased respect for the Englishman. His stuff or 
substance seems to be the best of the world. I forgive him 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

Ms pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no 
sympathy with him, only an admiration/^ ^ 

He did have real sympathy with Englishmen for those 
qualities in which he was like them. Especially good are his 
estimates of their ^'Character" and ^'Ability.'' The British 
quahty of persistence appealed to him and also the paradox by 
which England attracts everjrthing worth having although 
nothing is native. He quotes the French Comte de Laura- 
guais.as saying '^no fruit ripens in England but a baked 
apple," but adds that oranges and pineapples are as cheap 
in London as in the Mediterranean. Their manners amused 
him a bit. ^' Every one of these islanders is an island himself, 
safe, tranquil, incommunicable." He liked their pluck — 
^^They require you to be of your own opinion." In the chap- 
ter on '^ Truth" he calls attention to their national sincerity 
as the basis of their practical power. ^' Their ruling passion 
is a horror of humbug." 

He was not blind, of course, to defects either. '^A saving 
stupidity," he observes in the chapter on '^Character," 
'^ masks and protects their perception, as the curtain of the 
eagle's eye." The chapter on ^'Wealth" begins, ^^ There is 
no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth." 
The chapter on ^'Religion" must have been irritating to 
members of the Church of England, but the descendant of 
the Puritan could not help his instinctive revulsion against 
religious form. The weakness of English Traits lies in its 
historical references. His knowledge of Enghsh history and 
ethnology was faulty. He confuses the Saxons and Angles 
constantly and he is unfair to the Norman element in England, 
attributing practically all its virtues to the Saxon strain. 
Yet when all is said, English Traits^ while not so representa- 
tive a book as the earlier essays, remains one of the most 
interesting of Emerson's works. 

It is this combination of sympathy and hereditary detach- 
ment which makes English Traits such an interesting book. 
He was a descendant of Englishmen and yet he never forgot 
that his race had lived fast in the two hundred years that had 
separated them from the mother country. His independence 
in matters of religion and philosophy was closely paralleled 

1 Cf . note in Centenary Edition of English Traits, by E. W. Emer- 
son, p. 405. 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

by his attitude toward European standards of literary taste, 
methods of education, and pohtical institutions. The lecture 
on ^' The American Scholar '^ in 1837 is a literary declaration of 
independence. ^^Our day of dependence, our long ap- 
prenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.'' 
Much as he loved and appreciated Shakespeare,' he put his 
finger on one of the hindrances to the progress of our drama 
when he said: ^^ Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of 
genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation 
bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have 
Shakspearized now for two hundred years.'' His position 
was, of course, far different from the ignorant self-assertion 
which began, in this country, by 1840, to take the place of 
our earUer slavish dependence upon English criticism. The 
scholar is to be independent because he has the inspiration 
of the Infinite Mind to guide him. He is to be brave, self- 
trusting, active ; and as he has his rights, so he has his duties. 
If he fulfils them — ^^if the single man plant himself in- 
domitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world 
will come round to him." 

There was nothing parochial in his scholastic attitude — 
nor was his patriotism any more sectional than might have 
been expected. He had had a Southern roommate at col- 
lege and he had a broader view than Whittier or Garrison 
upon the subject of slavery, but his mind could not rise to 
the height of Lincoln's and consider the Union first and 
slavery afterwards. Yet he could foresee what was actually 
coming some time before Lincoln. In the Journal for 1856 
he prophesied that South Carolina would attack as soon as 
she was able to do it, and at the close of the ^^ Address on 
Affairs in Kansas," in the same year, he said: '^Send home 
every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to 
return to. Come home and stay at home, while there is a 
country to save." Two years later Lincoln in his debates 
with Stephen A. Douglas assured the citizens of Illinois 
that there was no danger of their having to invade the 
South. 

Emerson's love of country began, as was proper, with his 
love for his own soil, and he has probably never better 
epitomized his patriotic creed than in the oft quoted lines 
which he wrote for the dedication of the Battle Monument on 
July 4, 1837, at Concord. 



I 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

^'By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 
Here once the embattled farmers stood 

And fired the shot heard round the world." 

This was the kind of battle he loved to celebrate ; one in 
which individual initiative, combined with intelligence, 
defended its home against organized, less intelligent invasion. 

In his essay on Politics he carries his theories into the field 
of political organization with confidence. Much as he 
beheved the State to be a necessity, it must never sin against 
the rights of individuals, for they make up the vState. The 
law itseK is only as good as the men who made it, or, he 
expressed it effectively : 

^^Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own 
portrait : it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of 
time will return to the mint." 

The practical quality of Emerson's political philosophy is 
shown by his clear distinction between the rights of property 
and the rights of persons, and by his accurate judgment 
concerning the political beliefs and parties of his own day. 
^^Of the two great parties which at this hour almost share the 
nation between them, I should say that one has the best 
cause and the other contains the best men." He bfelieved in 
free trade and in universal suffrage But he liked the Whig 
leaders, though he thought they were timid. Even in this 
essay, however, the most suggestive portions are those in 
which he introduces us to himself. 

And that, after all, is the great reward of the readers of 
Emerson, as it was in a larger measure the reward of those 
who heard him lecture. They came in contact with a great 
personality and also with a great character. In these days, 
when we suffer from an excess of personality without the 
saving balance of character, Emerson's written word is all 
the more a tonic and a stimulant. For he speaks to us 
clearly as a poet, a prophet, and a patriot, — the coiner of 
immortal phrases, the severe critic of his own day, yet the 
hopeful prophet of better things to come, the patriot who 
loved his country too well to spare her faults but who even 
in moments of doubt or danger never despaired of the 
Republic. 



t 



EMERSON'S ESSAYS 



NATURE 

A SUBTLE chain of countless rings 
The next unto the farthest brings ; 
The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose ; 
And, striving to be man, the worm 
Moimts through all the spires of form. 

INTRODUCTION 

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the 
fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The 
foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face ; 
we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an 
original relation to the universe? Why should not we have 
a poetry and philosoph}^ of insight and not of tradition, and a 
religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? 
Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream 
around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they 
supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we 
grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living 
generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe ? The 
sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the 
fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let 
us demand our own works and laws and worship. 

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are 
unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation 
so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things 
has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. 
Every man^s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those 
inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he appre- 
hends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its 

1 



n 



2 NATURE 

forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us 
interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully 
around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature? 

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. 
We have theories of races and of functions, but scarce^ yet a 
remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far 
from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and 
hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound 
and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract 
truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, 
it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all 
phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained 
but inexphcable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, 
beasts, sex. 

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of 
Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that 
is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as 
the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and 
my own body, must be ranked under this name. Nature. 
In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, 
I shall use the word in both senses ; — in its common and in 
its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our 
present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of 
thought will occur. Nature^ in the common sense, refers to 
€ssences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the 
leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same 
things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his 
operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chip- 
ping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so 
grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not 
vary the result. 

NATURE 

I 

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his 
chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and 
write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be 
alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from 
those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what 
he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made 
transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly 



NATURE 3 

bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the 
streets of cities, how great they are ! If the stars should 
appear one night in a thousand years, how would men be- 
lieve and adore; and preserve for many generations the 
remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! 
But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light 
the universe with their admonishing smile. 

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though 
always present, they are inaccessible ; but all natural objects 
make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their 
influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither 
does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity 
by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a 
toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the moun- 
tains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they 
had delighted the simpUcity of his childhood. 

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a dis- 
tinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the 
integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. 
It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood- 
cutter from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape 
which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 
twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke 
that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of 
them owns the landscape. There is a property in the 
horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate 
all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these 
men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. 

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most 
persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very super- 
ficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, 
but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover 
of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still 
truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of 
infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with 
heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the 
presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in 
spite of teal sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and 
maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. 
Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season 
yields its tribute of delight ; for every hour and change corre- 
sponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from 



4 NATURE 

breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting 
that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good 
health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a 
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded 
sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special 
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am 
glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off 
his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever 
of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. 
Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity j 
reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not 
how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the 
woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that 
nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity 
{leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing 
on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and 
uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. 
I become a transparent eyeball ; I am nothing ; I see all ; the 
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me ; I am 
part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds 
then foreign and accidental : to be brothers, to be acquaint- 
ances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. 
I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the 
wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in 
the streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and 
especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds 
somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. 

The greatest dehght which the fields and woods minister 
is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the 
vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod 
to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm 
is new to me and old. It takes me b^^ surprise, and yet is not 
unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a 
better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was think- 
ing justly or doing right. 

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight 
does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of 
both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great tem- 
perance. For nature is not always tricked in hohday attire, 
but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and 
glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with 
melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the 



NATURE 5 

spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his 
own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt 
of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear 
friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less 
worth in the population. 

II 

Commodity 

Whoever considers the final cause of the world will discern 
a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They 
all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes : 
Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline. 

Under the general name of commodity, I rank all those 
advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, 
is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, 
like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in 
its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men appre- 
hend. The misery of man appears like childish petulance, 
when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has 
been made for his support and delight on this green ball 
which floats him through the heavens. What angels in- 
vented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, 
this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this 
firmament of earth between, this zodiac of lights, this tent of 
dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold 
year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The 
field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his 
garden, and his bed. 

"More servants wait on man 
Than he'll take notice of." 

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, 
but is also the process and the result. All the parts inces- 
santly work into each other ^s hands for the profit of man. 
The wind sows the seed ; the sun evaporates the sea ; the wind 
blows the vapor to the field ; the ice, on the other side of the 
planet, condenses rain on this ; the rain feeds the plant ; the 
plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of 
the divine charity nourish man. 

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by 



6 NATURE 

the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no 
longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he 
reahzes the fable of iEolus's bag, and carries the two and 
thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, 
he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with 
a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, 
he darts through the country, from town to town, like an 
eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of 
these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era 
of Noah to that of Napoleon ! The private poor man hath 
cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the 
post-office, and the human race run on his errands ; to the 
book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that 
happens, for him ; to the court-house, and nations repair his 
wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human 
race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and 
cut a path for him. 

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class 
of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so 
obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, 
with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one 
which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that 
he may be fed, but that he may work. 

Ill 

Beauty 

A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love 
of Beauty. 

The ancient Greeks called the world koct/xos, beauty. Such 
is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of 
the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the 
mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a deUght in and for 
themselves ; a pleasure arising from outUne, color, motion, and 
grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The 
eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its struc- 
ture and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which 
integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, 
into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the par- 
ticular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which 
they compose is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is 



NATURE 7 

the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is 
no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. 
And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infini- 
tude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. 
Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general 
grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are 
agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations 
of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the 
wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the 
lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, 
clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the 
palm. 

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of 
Beauty in a threefold manner. 

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a de- 
light. The influence of the forms and actions in nature is so 
needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie 
on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and 
mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, 
nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, 
the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and 
sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their 
eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems 
to demand a horizon. We are never tired, bo long as we can 
see far enough. 

But in other hours. Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and 
without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle 
of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from day- 
break to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. 
The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of 
crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into 
that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations ; 
the active enchantnient reaches my dust, and I dilate and 
conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us 
with a few and cheap elements ! Give me health and a day, 
and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The 
dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, 
and unimaginable realms of faerie ; broad noon shall be my 
England of the senses and the understanding ; the night shall 
be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams. 

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the 
afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. 



8 NATURE Ij 

The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into | 
pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness, and \ 
the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to i 
come within doors. What was it that nature would say? I 
Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind i 
the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not re-form j 
for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame | 
in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and 
the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered 
stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something tO' 
the mute music. \ 

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country land- 
scape is pleasant only half the year. T please myself with 
the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as 
much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. 
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own 
beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a 
picture which was never seen before, and which shall never 
be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and 
reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state 
of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of 
the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants 
in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock 
by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the 
divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes 
of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, 
follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water- 
courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia 
or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts 
of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in 
continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and 
gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala and boasts each 
month a new ornament. 

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, 
is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the 
rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, 
shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, 
become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. 
Go out of the house to see the moon, and H is mere tinsel ; 
it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary 
journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons 
of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, 



NATURE ^ 

and it is gone ; 't is only a mirage as you look from the win-^ 
dows of diligence. 

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual ele- 
ment is essential to its perfection. The high and divine 
beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which 
is found in combination with the human will. Beauty is the 
mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is grace- 
ful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place 
and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions 
that the universe is the property of every individual in it. 
Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and 
estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it ; 
he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most 
men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. 
In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes 
up the world into himself. ^^All those things for which men 
plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;'^ said Sallust. '^The 
winds and waves," said Gibbon, ^'are always on the side of 
the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the 
stars of heaven. When a noble act is done, — perchance in 
a scene of great natural beauty ; when Leonidas and his three 
hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and 
moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of 
Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, 
under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf 
of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades ; are not 
these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the 
beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the 
shore of America ; — before it the beach lined with savages, 
fleeing out of all their huts of cane ; the sea behind ; and the 
purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we 
separate the man from the living picture? Does not the 
New World clothe his form with her palm groves and savan- 
nahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like 
air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was 
dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death 
as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude 
cried out to him, ^'You never sate on so glorious a seat!" 
Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the 
patriot Lord Russell to be drawn in an open coach tlirough 
the principal streets of the city on his way to the scaffold. 
"But," his biographer says, "the multitude imagined they 



10 NATURE 

saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side/' In private places, 
among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at 
once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its 
candle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only 
let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she 
follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her 
lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling 
child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the 
frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with 
her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. 
Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly 
in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. 
The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And 
in common life whosoever has seen a person of powerful 
character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily 
he took all things along with him, — the persons, the opinions, 
and the day, and nature became ancillary to a man. 

3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of 
the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object 
of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they 
have a relation to thought. The intellect searches out the 
absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, 
and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the 
active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive 
activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the 
other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, 
but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working 
in animals ; each prepares and will be followed by the other. 
Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we 
have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, 
remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect ; and 
then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine 
dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The* beauty of 
nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren con- 
templation, but for new creation. 

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the 
world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is 
Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not . 
content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. 
The creation of beauty is Art. 

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the 
mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epit- 



NATURE 11 

ome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in 
miniature. For although the works of nature are innu- 
merable and all different, the result or the expression of them 
all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically 
alike and even unique. A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the 
ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is 
common to them all, — that perfectness and harmony, is 
beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of 
natural forms, — the totality of nature ; which the Italians 
expressed by defining beauty ^'il piu nelF uno.'^ Nothing 
is quite beautiful alone ; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. 
A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this 
universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the 
musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radi- 
ance of the world on one point, and each in his several work 
to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. 
Thus is Art a nature passed through the alembic of man. 
Thus in art does Nature work through the will of a man filled 
with the beauty of her first works. 

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of 
beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason 
can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, 
in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the 
universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and 
beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty 
in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and 
eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory gocfd. 
It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest 
expression of the final cause of Nature. . 

IV 

Language 

Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. 
Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and 
three-fold degree. 

L Words are signs of natural facts. 

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular 
spiritual facts. 

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. 

^ 1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural 
history is to give us aid in super-natural history ; the use of 



12 NATURE 

the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and 
changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used 
to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is 
found to be borrowed from some material appearance. 
Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily 
means wind; transgression^ the crossing of a line; supercilious, 
the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express 
emotion, the head to denote thought ; and thought and emotion 
are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appro- 
priated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which 
this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote 
time when language was framed; but the same tendency 
may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use 
only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, 
and apply to analogous mental acts. 

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual 
import, — so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, — 
is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are 
emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every 
natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every ap- 
pearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, 
and that state of the mind can only be described by pre- 
senting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged 
man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a 
learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is 
subtle spite ; flowers express to us the delicate affections. 
Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge 
and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind 
and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope. 

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not 
reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the 
stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the 
beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a uni- 
versal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as 
in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, 
arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason : it is 
not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its ; we are its property 
and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is 
buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting 
orbs, is the type of Reason. That which intellectually con- 
sidered we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we 
call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. 



NATURE IS 

And man in all ages and countries embodies it in his language 
as the Father. 

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious 
in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade 
nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and 
there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all 
objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of 
relation passes from every other being to him. And neither 
can man be understood without these objects, nor these 
objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken 
by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single 
sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. 
Whole floras, all Linnaeus' and Buffon's volumes, are dry 
catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the 
habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, 
applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy,, 
or in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the 
most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant, — 
to what affecting analogies in the nature of man is that little 
fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of Paul, 
who calls the human corpse a seed, — ^^It is sown a natural 
body; it is raised a spiritual body.'' The motion of the 
earth round its axis and round the sun, makes the day and the 
year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. 
But is there no intent of an analogy between man's life and 
the seasons ? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos 
from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unim- 
portant considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of 
relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge 
is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, 
then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, 
that it never sleeps, become sublime. 

Because of this radical correspondence between visible 
things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is 
necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, 
language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when 
it is all poetry ; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural 
symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original 
elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, 
that the idioms of all languages approach each other in pas- 
sages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is 
the first language, so is it the last. This immediate depend- 



14 NATURE 

ence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward 
phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human Hfe, never 
loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that 
piqua;ncy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or 
backwoodsman, which all men relish. 

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper 
symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his 
character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to 
communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is 
followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity 
of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the 
prevalence of secondary desires, — the desire of riches, of 
pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and false- 
hood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over na- 
ture as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new 
imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted 
to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is em- 
ployed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time 
the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate 
the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers 
may be found in every long-civilized nation who for a short 
time believe and make others believe that they see and utter 
truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its 
natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language 
created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, 
who hold primarily on nature. 

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words 
again to visible things ; so that picturesque language is at 
once a commanding certificate that he w^ho employs it is a 
man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our dis- 
course rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is 
inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself 
in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his 
intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or 
less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every 
thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. 
Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual 
allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending 
of experience with the present action of the mind. It is 
proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause 
through the instruments he has already made. 

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country- 



NATURE 15 

life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the artificial and 
curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than we 
can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind 
evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, 
bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their 
fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design 
and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson altogether,, 
in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter^ 
amidst agitation and terror in national councils, — in the 
hour of revolution, — these solemn images shall reappear in 
their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts 
which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a, 
noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, 
the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the moun- 
tains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with 
these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are 
put into his hands. 

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expres- 
sion of particular meanings. But how great a language ta 
convey such pepper-corn informations ! Did it need such 
noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of 
orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and 
grammar of his municipal speech ? Whilst we use this grand 
cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel 
that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We 
are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast 
their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to* 
clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question 
whether the characters are not significant of themselves. 
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but 
what we consciously give them when we employ them a& 
emblems of our thoughts ? The world is emblematic. Parts 
of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a. 
metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature 
answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. ^^The 
visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate 
of the invisible.'^ The axioms of physics translate the laws 
of ethics. Thus, 'Hhe whole is greater than its part;'^ 
"reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be 
made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being com-^ 
pensated by time ; " and many the like propositions, which 
have an ethical as well as physical sense. These proposi- 



16 NATURE I 

tions have a much more extensive and universal sense when 
-applied to human life, than when confined to technical use. 

In like manner, the memorable words of history and the 
proverbs of nations consist usually of a natural fact, selected 
as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling 
stone gathers no moss ; A bird in the hand is worth two in the 
bush; A cripple in the right way will beat a racer in the 
wrong ; Make hay while the sun shines ; T is hard to carry 
n full cup even ; Vinegar is the son of vane ; The last ounce 
broke the camel's back ; Long-lived trees make roots first ; — 
and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, 
but we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. 
What is true of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and 
allegories. 

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied 
by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to 
be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not ap- 
pear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the 
ivise man doubts if at all other times he is not blind and deaf ; 

''Can such things be, 
And overcome us Hke a summer's cloud. 
Without our special wonder?" 

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher 
lavfs than its own shines through it. It is the standing prob- 
lem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every 
fine genius since the world began ; from the era of the Egyp- 
tians and the Brahmins to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of 
Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx 
a,t the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes 
by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems 
to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms ; 
and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and 
alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and 
are what thej^ are by virtue of preceding affections in the 
world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The 
A^sible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the 
invisible world. ''Material objects," said a French philos- 
opher, "are necessarily kinds of sconce of the substantial 
thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an 
exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible 
nature must have a spiritual and moral side.'* 



NATURE 17 

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "gar- 
ment," "scoriae," "mirror," etc., may stimulate the fancy, 
we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors 
to make it plain. "Every scripture is to be interpreted by 
the same spirit which gave it forth," — is the fundamental 
law of criticism. A life in harmony with Nature, the love of 
truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her 
text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense 
of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall 
be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden 
life and final cause. 

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now 
suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude 
of objects; since "every object rightly seen, unlocks a new 
faculty of the soul." That which was unconscious truth, 
becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part 
of the domain of knowledge, — a new weapon in the maga- 
zine of power. 

V K 
Discipline 

In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at 
a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This use of the world 
includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself. 

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the 
animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day 
by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the 
Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter 
is a school for the understanding, — its solidity or resistance, 
its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The 
understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds 
nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. 
Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own 
world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries 
Matter and Mind. 

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intel- 
lectual truths. Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant 
exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of 
order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrangement; 
of ascent from particular to general ; of combination to one 
end of manifold forces. Proportioned to the importance of 



18 NATURE 

the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which its 
tuition is provided, — a care pretermitted in no single case. 
What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never 
ending, to form the common sense ; what continual reproduc- 
tion of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas ; what rejoicing 
over us of little men ; what disputing of prices, what reckon- 
ings of interest, — and all to form the Hand of the mind ; — 
to instruct us that ^'good thoughts are no better than good 
dreams, unless they be executed!" 

The same good office is performed by Property and its 
filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose 
iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear 
and hate ; — debt, which consumes so much time, which so 
cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem 
so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and 
is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, 
property, which has been well compared to snow, — "if it 
fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow," — 
is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index 
on the face of a clock. WTiilst now it is the gymnastics of 
the understanding, it is hiving, in the foresight of the spirit, 
experience in profounder laws. 

The whole character and fortune of the individual are 
affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the under- 
standing; for example, in the perception of differences. 
Therefore, is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know 
that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and 
individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and 
neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, 
coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor 
water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom 
in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of 
merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in 
their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. 
What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, 
they call the best. 

In like manner, what good heed Nature forms in us ! She 
pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay. 

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology (those 
first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take), 
teach that Nature^s dice are always loaded; that in her 
heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results. 



NATURE 19 

How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after 
another the laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate 
the mortal as he enters into the councils of th'fe creation, and 
feels by knowledge the privilege to Be ! His insight refines 
him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man 
is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because 
Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known. 

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the 
immense Universe to be explored. ''What we know is 
a point to what we do not know.'^ Open any recent journal 
of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning 
Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, 
and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely 
to be soon exhausted. 

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, 
we must not omit to specify two. 

The exercise of the Will, or the lesson of power, is taught 
in every event. From the child's successive possession of 
his several senses up to the hour when he saith, "Thy will 
be done !'' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under 
his will not only particular events but great classes, nay, 
the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his char- 
acter. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. 
It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on 
which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man 
as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. 
Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile 
and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives 
them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after 
another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces 
all things, until the world becomes at last only a realized 
will, — the double of the man. 

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason 
and reflect the conscience. All things are moral ; and in their 
boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual 
nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and 
motion; that every globe in the remotest heaven, every 
chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of 
life, every change of vegetation from the first principle of 
growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and ante- 
diluvian coal-mine, every animal function from the sponge 
up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right 



20 NATURE 

and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore 
is Nature ever the ally of Religion : lends all her pomp and 
riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, 
Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This 
ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, 
as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private 
purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public , 
and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in il 
nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served j 
an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior 
service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. 
Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and 
squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine 
of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves ; 
that a conspiring of parts and efforts to tlie production of 
an end is essential to any being. The first and gross manifes- 
tation of this truth is our inevitable and hated^ training in 
values and wants, in corn and meat. 

It has already been illustrated, that every natural process 
is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the j 
centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is : 
the pith and marrow of every substance, eYery relation, and 
every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. 
What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the 
wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, — it ' 
is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last 
stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But 
the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their 
several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, 
and leading to the same conclusion : because all organizations 
are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral 
sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and 
impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and 
sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon 
every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to 
him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much 
firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? 
how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the ' 
azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forever- 
more drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wTinkle 
or stain? how much industry and providence and affection 
we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What 



NATURE 21 

a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenom- 
enon of Health ! 

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, — 
the unity in variety, — which meets us everywhere. All 
the endless variety of things make an identical impression. 
Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he 
would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary 
of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. 
The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, 
a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and par- [ 
takes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a 
microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. 

Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is 
obvious, as when we detect the type of the human hand in 
the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein 
there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture 
is called ^^ frozen music, '^ by De Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius 
thought an architect should be a musician. ^'A Gothic 
church," said Coleridge, "is a petrified religion.'' Michael 
Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of 
anatomy is essential. In Haydn's oratorios, the notes 
present to the imagination not only motions, as of the snake, 
the stag, and the elephant, but colors also ; as the green grass. 
The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic 
colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the 
more or less of heat from the river that wears it away. The 
river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it ; the air 
resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile 
currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it 
through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the 
other ; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and 
their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, 
or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. 
So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under 
the undermost garment of Nature, and betrays its source 
in Universal Spirit. For it pervades Thought also. Every 
universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes 
every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is lilce 
a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; 
which, however, may be drawn and comprise it in like manner. 
Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. 
But it has innumerable sides. 



22 NATURE 

The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. 
Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot 
•cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, 
and impoverish it. An action is the perfection and publi- 
cation of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and 
to be related to all nature. ^^The wise man, in doing one 
thing, does all ; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees 
the likeness of all which is done rightly. '^ 

Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. 
They introduce us to the human form, of which all other 
organizations appear to be degradations. When this appears 
among so many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all 
others. It says, ^'From such as this have I drawn joy and 
knowledge ; in such as this have I found and beheld myself ; 
I wdll speak to it ; it can speak again ; it can yield me thought 
already formed and alive." In fact, the eye, — the mind, — 
is always accompanied by these forms, male and female ; 
and these are incomparably the richest informations of the 
power and order that lie at the heart of things. Unfortu- 
nately every one of them bears the marks as of some injury ; is 
marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different 
from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like 
fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thouglit and virtue 
whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the entrance. 

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry 
to our education, but where would it stop ? We are associated 
in adolescent and adult life with some friends, who, like skies 
and waters, are coextensive with our idea; who, answering 
each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on 
that side ; whom we lack power to put at such focal dis- 
tance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We 
cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with 
a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and 
has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus 
sends a real person to outgo our ideal ; when he has, moreover, 
become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains 
all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid 
and sweet wisdom, — it is a sign to us that his office is 
closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in 
;a short time. 



NATURE 25 

VI 

Idealism 

Thus is the unspeakable but inteUigible and practicable 
meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil^ 
in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all 
parts of nature conspire. 

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, — whether 
this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe ; and whether 
nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that 
Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human 
mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of 
congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and 
woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test 
the authenticity of the report of my senses, to loiow whether 
the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying 
objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up 
there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firma- 
ment of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the 
whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether 
land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle 
without number or end, — deep yawning under deep, and 
galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space, — or 
whether, without relations of time and space, the same 
appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? 
Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or 
is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and 
alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me 
so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses. 

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal 
theory, as if its consequences were burlesque ; as if it affected 
the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never 
jests with us, and wdll not compromise the end of nature 
permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any dis- 
trust of the permanence of laws would paralyze the faculties 
of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his 
faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are 
all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We 
are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. 
It is a natural consequence of this structure, that so long as 
the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist 



24 NATURE 

with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or 
iTiuta})le than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the 
carpenter, the tollman, are much displeased at the intimation. 

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of 
natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature 
still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on 
the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of 
particular phenomena, as of heat, watc^r, azote ; but to lead 
us to n^gard nature as phenomenon, not a substance ; to 
attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature 
as an a(;cident and an effect. 

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs 
a sort of instinctive belief in tlie al)solute existence of nature. 
In tlieir view man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things 
are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. 
The presence of R(^ason mars this faith. The first effort 
of thought tends to n^lax this despotism of the senses which 
binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us 
nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher 
agency ink^rvened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful 
accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the 
€ye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added 
grac(^ and (expression. Tlu^se proccxnl from imagination and 
affe(;tion, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness 
of objects. If the R(^ason be stimulated to more earnest 
vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are 
no longer seen ; causes and spirits are seen through them. 
Th(^ Ix^st moments of life are these delicious awakenings of 
th(^ higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature 
before its God. 

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 

1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint 
from Nature herself. 

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. 
Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local 
position, apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected 
by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or 
tlirough the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in 
our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A 
man who seklom rides, needs only to get into a coach and 
traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. 
The men, the women, — talking, running, bartering, fighting, 



NATURE 25 

— the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, 
the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached 
from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not 
substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by 
seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement 
of the railroad car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make 
a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. 
In a camera obscura, the butcher^s cart, and the figure of one 
of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known 
face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at 
the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the 
picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years ! 

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the 
difference between the observer and the spectacle — between 
man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe ; 
I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt, from the fact, 
probably, that man is hereby apprized that whilst the world 
is a spectacle, something in himself is stable. 

2. In a higher manner the poet communicates the same 
pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the 
sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, 
not different from what we know them, but only Hfted from 
the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land 
and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his 
primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed him- 
self by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. 
The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet 
conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature 
as rooted and fast ; the other, as fluid, and impresses his 
being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and 
flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and 
makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination 
may be defined to be the use which the Reason makes of 
the material world. Shakespeare possesses the power of 
subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond 
all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble 
from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of 
thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest 
spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things 
are brought together, by a subtile spiritual connection. We 
are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, 
and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the 



26 NATURE 

poet. Thus in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and 
dyes of flowers he finds to be the shadow of his beloved ; time^ 
wWch keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has 
awakened, is her ornament; 

The ornament of beauty is Suspect, 

A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air. 

His passion is not the fruit of chance ; it swells, as he speaks^ 
to a city, or a state. 

No, it was builded far from accident ; 

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 

Under the brow of thralling discontent ; 

It fears not policy, that heretic, 

That works on leases of short numbered hours. 

But all alone stands hugely politic. 

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to 
him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love 
dazzles him with its resemblance to morning ; 

Take those lips away 
Which so sweetly were forsworn ; 
. And those eyes, — the break of day. 
Lights that do mislead the morn. 

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say in passing, it 
would not be easy to match in literature. 

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo 
through the passion of the poet, — this power which he 
exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small, — might be 
illustrated by a thousand examples from his Plays. I have 
before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines. 

Ariel. The strong based promontory 
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up 
The pine and cedar. 

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his 
companions ; 

A solemn air, and the best comforter 
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains 
Now useless, boiled within thy skull. 



NATURE 27 

Again ; 

The charm dissolves apace, 
And, as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle 
Their clearer reason. 

Their understanding 
Beg(ins to swell : and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores 
That now lie foul and muddy. 

The perception of real affinities between events (that is. 
to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real), enables 
the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and 
phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of 
the soul. 

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own: 
thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that 
the one proposes Beauty as liis main end, the other Truth.. 
But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the 
apparent order and relations of things to the empire of 
thought. '^The problem of philosophy,^' according to Plato, 
^^is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground un- 
conditioned and absolute.'' It proceeds on the faith that 
a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the- 
phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind,, 
is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher 
and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and 
a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the 
charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions strictly like 
that of the Antigone of Sophocles ? It is, in both cases, that a 
spiritual life has been imparted to nature ; that a solid seem- * 
ing block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by 
a thought ; that this feeble human being has penetrated the 
vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized 
itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, 
when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its 
cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of 
observation in a single formula. 

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the 
spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their 
irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. 
The sublime remark of Euler on. his law of arches, '^This; 



28 NATURE 

will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true'^ had 
already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter 
like an outcast corpse. 

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invari- 
ably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He 
that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be 
assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries/' It 
fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated 
natures, that is, upon Ideas ; and in their presence we feel 
that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. 
Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature 
as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and 
know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. 
"These are they who were set up from everlasting, from 
the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared 
the heavens, they were there ; when he established the 
clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. 
Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them 
took he counsel." 

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science 
they are accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable 
of being raised by piety or by passion, into their region. 
And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, 
in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they 
renew the body. We become physically nimble and light- 
some ; we tread on air ; life is no longer irksome, and we think 
it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death 
in their serene company, for he is transported out of the 
district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature 
of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the 
absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend 
the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We 
become immortal, for we learn that time and space are 
relations of matter; that with a perception of truth or a 
virtuous will they have no affinity. 

5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called 
the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life, 
have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading 
nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics 
and religion differ herein ; that the one is the system of human 
duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Re- 
ligion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not. 



NATURE 29 

They are one to our present design. They both put nature 
under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, ^'The 
things that are seen, are temporal ; the things that are unseen, 
are eternal.'^ It puts an affront upon nature. It does that 
for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and 
Yiasa. The uniform language that may be heard in the 
churches of the most ignorant sects is, — ^'Contemn the 
unsubstantial shows of the world ; they are vanities, dreams, 
shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The 
devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at 
a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the 
Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves 
any looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus 
was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of 
matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, ''It 
is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul 
which he has called into time." 

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual 
science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the 
reality of the external world. But I own there is something 
ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of 
the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us 
with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's 
love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and 
melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones 
at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only 
wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, 
wherein to establish man all right education tends; as the 
ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, 
of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the 
vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that 
apparent which it uses to call real, and that real which it 
uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the 
external world. The belief that it appears only, is an after- 
thought, but with culture this faith will as surely arise on 
the mind as did the first. 

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith 
is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which 
is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which 
Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy 
and virtue, take. For seen in the light of thought, the world 
always is phenomenal ; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. 



30 NATURE 

Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle 
of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and 
religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act 
after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture 
which God paints on the instant eternit}^ for the contemplation 
of the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too 
trivial and microscopic stud}^ of the universal tablet. It 
respects the end too much to immerse itself in the means. 
It sees something more important in Christianity than the 
scandals of ecclesiastical liistory or the niceties of criticism ; 
and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not 
at all disturbed bj^ chasms of historical evidence, it accepts 
from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and 
awiul form of religion in the world. It is not hot and pas- 
sionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or 
bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. 
No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as 
part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and 
it is a doer, only that it may the better watch. 

VII 

Spirit 

It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that 
it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are 
exliausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, 
cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein man 
is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate 
and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of 
being summed in one, wliich yields the activity of man 
an infinite scope. Tlirough all its kingdoms, to the suburbs 
and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence 
it had its origin. It alwa^^s speaks of Spirit. It suggests 
the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow 
pointing always to the sun behind us. 

The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, 
she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the 
breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the 
lesson of worship. 

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that 
thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God in the 



NATURE 31 

coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but 
when we try to define and describe himself, both language 
and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and 
savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, 
but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest 
ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It 
is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the 
indi\ddual, and strives to lead back the indi\ddual to it. 

"WHien we consider Spirit, we see that the views already 
presented do not include the whole circumference of man. 
We must add some related thoughts. 

Three problems are put by nature to the mind: What 
is matter? Whence is it? and "VMiereto? The first of 
these questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism 
saith : matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism 
acquaints us mth the total disparity between the evidence 
of our own being and the evidence of the world's being. The 
one is perfect ; the other, incapable of any assurance : the 
mind is a part of the nature of things ; the world is a divine 
dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories 
and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account 
for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and 
chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it 
does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God 
out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my 
perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists 
it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive 
being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with 
human life that there is something of humanity in all and 
in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign 
to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which 
we acknowledge to it. 

Let it stand then, in the present state of our knowledge, 
merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize 
us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world. 

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come 
to inquire. Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths 
arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn 
that the highest is present to the soul of man ; that the 
dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or 
beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that 
for which all things exist, and that by which they are ; that 



32 NATURE 

spirit creates ; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit 
is present ; one and not compound it does not act upon us 
from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, 
or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the 
Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth 
through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches 
and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon 
the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is 
nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need 
inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibili- 
ties of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted 
to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we 
learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, 
is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which ad- 
monishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, 
and points to virtue as to 

"The golden key 
Which opes the palace of eternity/* 

carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because 
it animates me to create my own world through the purifi- 
cation of my soul. 

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of 
man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, 
a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from 
the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now 
subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable 
by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the 
divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure 
our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between 
us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers 
in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand 
the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from 
us ; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses 
of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato 
and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which 
hath a grandeur, a face of him ? Yet this may show us what 
discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely 
admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field 
hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight 
until he is out of the sight of men. 



NATURE 33 

VIII 

Prospects 

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame 
of things, the highest reason is always the truest. That 
which seems faintly possible, it is so refined, is often faint and 
dim because it is deepest seated in the mind among the 
eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, 
and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to 
bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the 
whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read 
naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, 
will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to 
the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition 
or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, 
but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a con- 
tinual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will per- 
ceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student 
than preciseness and infallibility ; that a guess is often more 
fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream 
may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred 
concerted experiments. 

For the problems to be solved are precisely those which 
the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not 
so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal 
kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyran- 
nizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates 
and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse 
to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to 
my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition 
of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude 
is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor 
minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain 
the relation between things and thoughts ; no ray upon the 
metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show 
the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architec- 
ture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet 
of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult 
recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy 
and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American 
who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of 



34 NATURE 

buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on 
entering York Minster or St. Peter^s at Rome, by the feeling 
that these structures are imitations also, — faint copies of 
.an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, 
so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity 
which subsists between man and the world; of which he is 
lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but 
because he is its head and heart, and finds something of 
himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain 
stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or 
atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lays 
open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of 
•George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth 
century. The following lines are part of his little poem on 
Man. 

Man is all symmetry, 
Full of proportions, one limb to another. 

And all to all the world besides. 

Each part may call the farthest, brother ; 
For head with foot hath private amity. 

And both with moons and tides. 

Nothing hath got so far 
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey ; 

His eyes dismount the highest star : 

He is in little all the sphere. 
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 

Find their acquaintance there. 

For us, the winds do blow, 
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow ; 

Nothing we see, but means our good, 

As our delight, or as our treasure ; 
The whole is either our cupboard of food. 

Or cabinet of pleasure. ^ 

The stars have us to bed : 
Night draws the curtain ; which the sun withdraws. 

Music and light attend our head. 

All things unto our flesh are kind, 
In their descent and being ; to our mind, 

In their ascent and cause. 

More servants wait on man 
Than he'll take notice of. In every path, 



NATURE 35 

He treads down that which doth befriend him 
When sickness makes him pale and wan. 
Oh mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 
Another to attend him. 

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction 
which draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in 
attention to the means. In view of this half -sight of science^ 
we accept the sentence of Plato, that "poetry comes nearer 
to vital truth than history.' ' Every surmise and vaticination 
of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to 
prefer imperfect theories, and sentences which contain 
glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one 
valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends 
of study and composition are best answered by announcing 
undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating,, 
through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. 

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions- 
of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me ; and 
which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps 
reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy. 

*The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. 
But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the 
longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young; 
and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom 
the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all 
history is but the epoch of one degradation. 

'We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. 
We own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are like 
Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating 
grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial 
force of spirit? 

'A man is 'a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life 
shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal as gently 
as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane 
and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds 
of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy 
is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the, arms of fallen 
men, and pleads with them to return to paradise. 

'Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated 
and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his over- 
flowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon ; 
from man the sun, from woman the moon. The laws of his 



36 NATURE ' 

mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into 
day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having 
made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no 
longer fills the veins and veinlets ; he is shrunk to a drop. 
He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. 
Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him 
from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. 
Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower 
of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and 
wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at 
the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if 
his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, 
if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, 
it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is instinct.' 
Thus my Orphic poet sang. 

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He 
works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives 
in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom ; and he that works 
most in it is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong 
and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a self- 
ish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is 
through the understanding, as by manure ; the economic use 
of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle ; steam, coal, 
■chemical agriculture ; the repairs of the human body by the 
dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power 
as if a banished king should buy his territories inch by inch, 
instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, 
in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a 
better light, — occasional examples of the action of man 
upon nature with his entire force, — with reason as well as 
understanding. Such examples are, the traditions of miracles 
in the earliest antiquity of all nations ; the history of Jesus 
Christ ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and 
political revolutions, and in the abolition of the slave-trade ; 
the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Sweden- 
borg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet 
contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal 
Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the 
wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's mo- 
mentary grasp of the sceptre ; the exertions of a power which 
exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming 
causing power. The difference between the actual and the 



NATURE 37 

ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in 
saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, 
vespertina cognitioy but that of God is a morning knowledge, 
matutina cognitio. 

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal 
beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin 
or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our 
own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis 
of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. 
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in 
heaps, is because man is disunited with himself. He cannot 
be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. 
Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither 
can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning 
of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. 
Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is 
not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God 
after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty 
has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And 
there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject 
under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer 
also a study of truth, — a sally of the soul into the unf ound 
infinite? No man every prayed heartily without learning 
something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach 
every object from personal relations and see it in the light 
of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the 
fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into 
the creation. 

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to 
search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to 
see the miraculous in the common. Whtit is a day? What 
is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What 
is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things 
seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness 
of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the 
mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, 
the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real 
higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, 
and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought 
to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman 
and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are 
known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, 



38 NATURE 



but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and j 
affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question oc-;; 
cupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be | * 
solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, { \ 
to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises * ' 
in life, our daily history with the rise and progress of ideas 
in the mind. 

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It 
shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — \\Tiat 
is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding | 
itself passive to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass 
what my poet said: 'Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit 
alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of 
nature is the absence of spirit ; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is 
volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house, 
and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. 
Know then that the world exists for you. For you is the 
phenomenon perfect. Whsit we are, that only can we see. 
All that Adam had, all that Csesar could, you have and can 
do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth ; Csesar called 
his house, Rome ; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade ; 
a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. 
Yet line for line and point for point your dominion is as great 
as theirs, though without fine names. Build therefore your 
own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea 
in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A 
correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of 
the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, 
spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; 
they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor 
and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up and the wind exhale. 
As when the summer comes from the south the snow-banks 
melt and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so 
shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, 
and carry with it the beauty it visits and the song which 
enchants it ; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise 
discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no 
more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh 
not with observation, — a dominion such as now is beyond 
his dream of God, — he shall enter without more wonder 
than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect 
sight.' 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta 

E^APPA Society at Cambridge, 

August 31, 1837. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

1 greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. 
Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of 
labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the 
recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient 
Greeks ; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Trouba- 
dours ; nor for the advancement of science, like our contem- 
poraries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our 
holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the 
love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any 
more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible 
instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to 
be, and will be, something else ; when the sluggard intellect 
of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the 
postponed expectation of the world with something better 
than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of depen- 
dence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, 
draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing 
into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign 
harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will 
sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and 
lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which 
now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one 
day be the pole star for a thousand years? 

In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but 
the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day, — 
the American Scholar. Year by year we come up hither 
to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire 

39 



40 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

what light new days and events have thrown on his character 
and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity 
convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the begin- 
ning, divided Man into Men, that he might be more helpful 
to himself ; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better 
to answer its end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime ; that 
there is One Man, — present to all particular men only par- 
tially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the 
whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, ! 
or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, ' 
and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In 
the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out 
to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint 
work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that 
the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from -j 
his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfor- i 
tunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been '. 
so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided 
and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be 
gathered. The state of society is one in which the members 
have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so 
many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, 
an elbow, but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. ' 
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, 
is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his min- 
istry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, 
and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The 
tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but 
is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to 
dollars. The priest becomes a form ; the attorney a statute- 
book ; the mechanic a machine ; the sailor a rope of the ship. 

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated 
intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the de- 
generate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become 
a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men^s think- 
ing. 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his 
ofHce is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, 
all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 41 

future invites. Is not indeed every man a student, and do 
not all things exist for the student^s behoof? And, finally^ 
is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old 
oracle said, "All things have two handles: beware of the 
wrong one/' In life, too often, the scholar errs with man- 
kind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, 
and consider him in reference to the main influences he re- 
ceives. 

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the in- 
fluences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the 
sun ; and, after sunset. Night and her stars. Ever the winds 
blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, 
conversing — beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of 
all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle 
its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is 
never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable 
continuity of this web of God, but always circular power re- 
turning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose 
beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so- 
boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system on system 
shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without 
circumference, — in the mass and in the particle. Nature hast- 
ens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification 
begins. To the young mind every thing is individual, stands 
by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see 
in them one nature ; then three, then three thousand ; and so, 
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying 
things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots run- 
ning under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere 
and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since 
the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation 
and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the 
perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not 
foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human 
mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure 
abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary 
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible 
method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the 
finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The 
ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact ; one 
after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers,. 



42 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate 
the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by 
insight. 

Thus to him, to this schoolboy under the bending dome of 
day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root ; one 
is leaf and one is flower ; relation, sympathy, stirring in every 
vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his 
^ soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when 
\ this spiritual fight shall have revealed the law of more earthly 
natures, — when he has learned to worship the soul, and to 
see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first 
gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever 
expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see 
that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for 
part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty 
of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Na- 
ture then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So 
much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind 
does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, 
'^Know thyself, '^ and the modern precept, ^^ Study nature,'' 
become at last one maxim. 

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar 
is the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of liter- 
ature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books 
are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we 
shall get at the truth, — learn the amount of this influence 
more conveniently, — by considering their value alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age 
received into him the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave 
it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. 
It came into him fife ; it went out from him truth. It came 
to him short-lived actions ; it went out from him immortal 
thoughts. It came to him business ; it went from him poetry. 
It was dead fact ; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, 
and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. 
Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it 
issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, 
of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the complete- 
ness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness 
of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air- 
pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 43 

can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, 
the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, 
that shall be as efficient,|in all respects, to a remote posterity^ 
as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, 
it is found, must write its own books ; or rather, each genera- 
tion for the next succeeding. The books of an older period 
will not fit this. 

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which 
attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is trans- 
ferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a di- 
vine man : henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer 
was a just and wise spirit : henceforward it is settled the book 
is perfect ; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his 
statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious : the guide is a 
tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, 
slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so 
opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and 
makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. 
Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking ; 
by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from 
accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. 
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty 
to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, 
have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were 
only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. 
Hence the book-learned class, who value books as such ; not 
as related to nature and the human constitution, but as mak- 
ing a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence 
the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs 
of all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among 
the worst. What is the right use ? What is the one end which 
all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. 
I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attrac- 
tion clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead 
of a system. The one thing in the world of value, is the active 
soul. This every man is entitled to ; this every man contains 
within him, although in almost all men obstructed and as yet 
unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, 
or creates. In this action, it is genius ; not the privilege of 
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. 



44 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR ^ 

In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the 
school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past 
utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold 
by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not 
forward. But genius looks forward : the eyes of man are 
set in his forehead, not in his hindhead : man hopes : genius 
creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, 
the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ; — cinders and smoke 
there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, 
there are creative actions, and creative words ; manners, ac- 
tions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but 
springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and 
fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it re- 
ceive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents 
of Ught, without periods of solitude, inquest, and seK-recovery, 
and a fatal disservice is done. -Genius is always sufficiently 
the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of 
every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets 
have Shakspearized now for two hundred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly 
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his 
instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When 
he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted 
in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the 
intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the 
sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair 
to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our 
steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that 
we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, ^'A fig tree, look- 
ing on a fig tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive 
from the best books. They impress us with the conviction 
that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses 
of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of 
Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, T mean, 
which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time 
from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy 
of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, 
two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to 
my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. 
But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doc- 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 45 

trine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some pre- 
established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, 
and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like 
the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for 
the young grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any ex- 
aggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, 
that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though 
it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind 
can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men 
have existed who had almost no other information than by 
the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong 
head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. 
As the proverb says, *^He that would bring home the wealth of 
the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies. '^ There 
is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When 
the mind is braced by labor and invention, the p„ l_ of what- 
ever book we read becomes luminous with niauifol;] allusion. 
Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sejise of our 
author is as broad as the world. We then see, what ic alvvays 
true, that as the seer's hour of vision h short and rare among 
heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least 
part of his volume. The discerning will read, in In P-.: or 
Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utter- 
ances of the oracle ; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so 
many times Plato\s and Shakspeare's. 

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable 
to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by 
laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their in- 
dispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only 
highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create ; when 
they gather from far every ray of various genius to thoir J^os- 
pitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the heai is of 
their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures 
in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns 
and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never 
countervail the least sentence or sA'-^able of wit. Forget this, 
and our American colleges will roc^ le in their pubhc impor- 
tance, whilst they grow richci* evi;ry year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should 
be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork 
or public labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called **prac- 



46 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

tical men'' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they specu- 
late or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that 
the clergy, — who are always, more universally than any other 
class, the scholars of their day, — are addressed as women; 
that the rough spontaneous conversation of men they do not 
hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often 
virtually disfranchised ; and indeed there are advocates for 
their cehbacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, 
it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordi- 
nate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. With- 
out it thought can never- ripen into truth. Whilst the world 
hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see 
its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar 
without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, thetran- 
'Bition through which it passes from the unconscious to the 
conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have 
lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with Ufe, 
and whose not. 

The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me, — hes 
wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my 
thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly 
into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next 
me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught 
by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with 
speech. I pierce its orders ; I dissipate its fear ; I dispose of 
it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of 
life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I 
vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, 
my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the 
sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which 
he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. 
Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in elo- 
quence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every oppor- 
tunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw ma- 
terial out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. 
A strange process too, this by which experience is converted 
into thought) as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The 
manufacture goes forward at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now 
matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in 
the air. Not so with our recent actions, — \vith the business 
which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 47 

speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We 
no more feel or. know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or 
the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, — 
remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some 
contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe 
fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, 
transfigured ; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Hence- 
forth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and 
neighborhood. Observe too the impossibility of antedating 
this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is 
a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the self- 
same thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. 
So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which 
shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and 
astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.' 
Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, 
and dogs, and ferrules, the love of little maids and berries, and 
many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone al-; 
ready; friend and relative, profession and party, town andj 
country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. -^ 

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit' 
actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut my- 
self out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a 
flower-pot, there to hunger and pine ; nor trust the revenue of 
some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much 
like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving 
shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all 
Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and 
discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine 
trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out 
their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail 
for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, 
or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covet- 
o.us of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent 
in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and 
manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and 
women ; in science ; in art ; to the one end of mastering in all 
their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our 
perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how 
much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splen- 
dor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from 



4c THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. 
This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only 
copy the language which the field and the work-yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better 
than books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of 
Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and 
expiring of the breath ; in desire and satiety ; in the ebb and 
flow of the sea ; in day and night ; in heat and cold ; and, 
^s yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, 
is known to us under the name of Polarity, — these '^fits of 
easy transmission and reflection,'^ as Newton called them, are 
the law of nature because they are the law of spirit. 

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces 
the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when 
the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer appre- 
hended and books are a weariness, — he has always the re- 
source to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking 
is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream re- 
treats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as 
well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to 
impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental 
force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a par- 
tial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let 
the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those ^^far 
from fame,'' who dwell and act with him, will feel the force 
of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better 
than it can be measured by any public and designed display. 
Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the 
man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, 
screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained 
in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education 
have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to de- 
stroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled sav- 
age nature ; out of terrible Druids and Berserkers come at 
last Alfred and Shakspeare. 

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said 
of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There 
is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as 
for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome ; always 
we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, 
that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice 
any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 49 

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, 
by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his 
duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all 
be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to 
cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst 
appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid 
task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed 
observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all 
men, and the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. 
But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and 
nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has 
thought of as such, — watching days and months sometimes 
for a few facts ; correcting still his old records ; — must re- 
linquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of 
his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shift- 
lessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who 
shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; 
often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must ac- 
cept — how often! — poverty and solitude. For the ease 
and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fash- 
ions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the 
cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, 
the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, 
which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self- 
relying and self-directed ; and the state of virtual hostility 
in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to edu- 
cated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He 
is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of hu- 
man nature. He is one who raises himself from private con- 
siderations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious 
thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. 
He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to 
barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic senti- 
ments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions 
of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emer- 
gencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary 
on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. 
And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat 
pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, — this 
he shall hear and promulgate. 

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all con- 



50 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

fidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He 
and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is 
the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish 
of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is 
cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, 
as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds 
are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought 
which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let 
him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the 
ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of 
doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him 
hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of 
neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, — happy 
enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen 
something truly. Success treads on every right step. For 
the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what 
he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets 
of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds. 
He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private 
thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language 
he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be trans- 
lated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spon- 
taneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have re- 
corded that which men in crowded cities find true for them 
also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank con- 
fessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, 
until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers ; — 
that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their 
own nature ; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest 
presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most accept- 
able, most public, and universally true. The people delight 
in it ; the better part of every man feels. This is my music ; 
this is myself. 

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should 
the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the defini- 
tion of freedom, ^Svithout any hindrance that does not arise 
out of his own constitution.^^ Brave ; for fear is a thing which 
a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always 
springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, 
amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption that like 
children and women his is a protected class ; or if he seek a 
tertporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 51 

or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flower- 
ing bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, 
as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a 
danger still ; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and 
face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect 
its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — which lies no 
great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect com- 
prehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his 
hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and 
pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its 
pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what 
overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance, — by 
your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt 
it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is a mis- 
chievous notion that we are come late into nature ; that the 
world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic 
and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his 
attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. 
They adapt themselves to it as they may ; but in proportion 
as a man has any thing in him divine, -the firmament flows be- 
fore him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who 
can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They 
are the kings of the world who give the color of their present 
thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men b}^ the 
cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing 
which they do is the apple which the ages have desired to 
pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. 
The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald 
sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany 
the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and 
the herb-woman ; Davy, chemistry ; and Cuvier, fossils. 
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great 
aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose 
mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic 
follow the moon. 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, 
— darker than can be enlightened.- I might not carry with 
me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I 
have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the 
doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged ; 
he has wionged himself. He has almost lost the light that 



52 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 



1 



can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become 
of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, 
are bugs, are spawn, and are called ^^the mass'' and 'Hhe 
herd.'' In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that 
is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every 
man. AH the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own 
green and crude being, — ripened ; yes, and are content to be 
less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, 
full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his 
own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who 
rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find 
some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their ac- 
quiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are 
content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, 
so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature 
which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. 
They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be 
their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their 
downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish 
to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those 
giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we 
live in him. 

Men, such as they are, very naturally seek money or power ; 
and power because it is as good as money, — the ^^ spoils," so 
called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the 
highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. 
Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the 
true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revo- 
lution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the 
idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splen- 
dor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the 
materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one 
man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable 
to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its 
friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly 
viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. 
Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, 
as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The " 
books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, 
we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we | 
have come up with the point of view which the universal i 
mind took through the eyes of one scribe ; we have been that ] 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 53 

man, and have passed on. First, one, then another, we 
drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies^ 
we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has 
never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot 
be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one 
side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central 
fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the 
capes of Sicily and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illu- 
minates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light 
which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which 
animates all men. 

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction 
of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I 
have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country. 

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas 
which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data 
for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and 
now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views 
I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind 
through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differ- 
ences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all 
three. The boy is a Greek ; the youth, romantic ; the adult, 
reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the 
leading idea may be distinctly enough traced. 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that 
needs be evil ? We, it seems, are critical ; we are embarrassed 
with second thoughts ; we cannot enjoy any thing for hanker- 
ing to know whereof the pleasure consists ; we are lined with 
eyes ; we see with our feet ; the time is infected with Hamlet's 
unhappiness, — 

''Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.'^ 

It is so bad then ? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would 
we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and 
God, and drink truth dry ? I look upon the discontent of the 
literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that they 
find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and 
regret the coming state as untried ; as a boy dreads the water 
before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period 
one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution ; 
when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being 



54 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

compared ; when the energies of all men are searched by fear 
and by hope ; when the historic glories of the old can be com- 
pensated by the rich possibilities of the new era ? This time, 
like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do 
with it. 

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming 
days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through 
philosophy and science, through church and state. 

One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which 
effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the 
state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an 
aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the 
low, the common, was explored and poetized. That which 
had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were 
harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into 
far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign 
parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, 
the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, 
are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign — 
is it not ? — of new vigor when the extremities are made ac- 
tive, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the 
feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ; what 
is doing in Italy or Arabia ; what is Greek art, or Provengal 
minstrels}^; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the 
feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, 
and you may have the antique and future worlds. ^Yliat 
would we reaUy know the meaning of ? The meal in the fii'kin ; 
the milk in the pan ; the ballad in the street ; the news of the 
boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the 
body ; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters ; show 
me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurldng, 
as alw^ays it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of 
nature ; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that 
ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the 
plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause b}^ which 
light undulates and poets sing ; — and the world lies no longer 
a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order ; 
there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and 
animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cow- 
per, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. 
This idea they have differently followed and with various 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 55 

success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of 
Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing 
is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are 
not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The 
near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is 
related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the 
vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing, 
the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever 
did, the genius of the ancients. « 

There is one man of genius who has done much for this, 
philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been: 
rightly estimated ; — I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The 
most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a 
mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosoph- 
ical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such 
an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius 
could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection 
between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced 
the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, 
tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover 
over and interpret the lower parts of nature ; he showed the 
mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material 
forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, 
of beasts, of unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous 
political movement, is the new importance given to the single 
person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual,. 
— to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that' 
each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with 
man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state, — tends to 
true union as well as greatness. ^^I learned,'^ said the melan- 
choly Pestalozzi, "that no man in God^s wide earth is either 
willing or able to help any other man.^^ Help must come 
from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must 
take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contri- 
butions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be 
an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more 
than another which should pierce his ear, it is. The world is 
nothing, the man is all ; in yourself is the law of all nature, 
and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends ; in your- 
self slumbers the whole of Reason ; it is for you to know all ; 
it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this 



56 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all 
motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation to the American 
Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of 
Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already sus- 
pected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private ava- 
rice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is 
decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic con- 
sequence. The mmd of this count r}^, taught to aim at low 
objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the 
decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest 
promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the moun- 
tain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, fuid the earth 
below not in unison mth these, but are hindered from action 
by the disgust which th^ principles on which business is man- 
aged inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them 
suicides. What is the remedy? They did not j^et see, and 
thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the 
barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man 
plant liimself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, 
the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — pa- 
tience ; with the shades of all the good and great for company ; 
and for solace the perspective of j^our o^Ya mfinite life ; and 
for work the study and the communication of principles, the 
makmg those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. 
Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit ; — 
not to be reckoned one character ; — not to yield that peculiar 
fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned 
in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the 
section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted 
geogi'aphicall}^, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers 
and friends — please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk 
on our own feet ; we will work wdth our ot\tl hands ; we will 
speak our otmi minds. The study of letters shall be no longer 
a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The 
dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence 
and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the 
first tune exist, because each believes liimself inspired by the 
Di\dne Soul which also mspires all men. 



HISTORY 

There is no great and no small 
To the Soul that maketh all : 
And where it cometh, all things are ; 
And it cometh everywhere. 

I am owner of the sphere, 

Of the seven stars and the solar year, 

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain. 

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain. 

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every 
man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is 
once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of 
the whole estate. What Plato has thought he may think; 
what a saint has felt he may feel; what at any time has 
befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to 
this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, 
for this is the only and sovereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius 
is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable 
by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without 
rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to 
embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which 
belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always 
prior to the fact ; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind 
as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances pre- 
dominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at 
a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The 
creation. of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, 
Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in 
the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, 
republic, democracy, are merely the applications of his 
manifold spirit to the manifold world. 

57 



58 HISTORY Ij 

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. \ 
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of-,! 
history is in one man, it is all to be explained from indi\ddual 
experience. There is a relation between the hours of our 
life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn 
from the great repositories of nature, as the hght on my book 
is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as 
the poise of my body depends on the equihbrium of centrif- 
ugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed 
by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the 
imiversal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. 
All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private 
experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have 
done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every 
revolution was first a thought in one man^s mind, and when 
the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that 
era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it 
shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of 
the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in 
me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must be- 
come Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martjT and 
executioner, must fasten these images to some reaUty in our 
secret experience, or we shaU learn nothing rightly. What 
befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration 
of the mind^s powers and deprivations as what has befallen 
us. Each new law and political movement has a meaning for 
you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, ^ Under this 
mask did my Proteus nature hide itseK.^ This remedies the 
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws 
our actions into perspective : and as crabs, goats, scorpions, 
the balance, and the water-pot lose their meanness when 
hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without 
heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Cati- 
line. 

It is the universal nature which gives worth to "particular 
men and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious 
and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and 
laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason ; all express 
more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illim- 
itable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great 
spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with 
swords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The 



HISTORY 59 

obscure consciousness of this fact is the hght of all our day, 
the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for 
charity, the foundation of friendship and love, and of the 
heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. 
It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as su- 
perior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, 
do not in their stateliest pictures, — in the sacerdotal, the 
imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius — any- 
where lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, 
that this is for better men ; but rather is it true, that in their 
grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare 
says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner 
feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great 
moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resist- 
ances, the great prosperities of men ; — because there law was 
enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the 
blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would 
have done or applauded. 

We have the same interest in condition and character. 
We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, 
power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper 
to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or Oriental 
or modern essajdst, describes to each reader his own idea, 
describes his unattained but attainable self. All hterature 
writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, 
pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the 
lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise 
him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves 
as by personal allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never 
needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. 
He hears the commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, 
of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concern- 
ing character, yea, further, in every fact and circumstance, — 
in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, 
homage tendered, love flows from mute nature, from the 
mountains and the lights of the firmament. 

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let 
us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively 
and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books 
the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will 
utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. 
I have no expectation that any man will read history aright. 



60 HISTORY 

who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men 
whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than 
what he is doing to-day. 

The world exists for the education of each man. There 
is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to 
which there is not somewhat corresponding in his hfe. Every- 
thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbre^date itself and 
yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live 
all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, 
and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but 
know that he is greater than all the geography and all the 
government of the world ; he must transfer the point of view 
from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens 
and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he 
is the court, and if England or Egypt have an3d:hing to say 
to him, he will try the case ; if not, let them forever be silent. 
He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts 
yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. 
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays 
itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. 
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. 
No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. 
Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and early Rome have passed 
or are passing into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun 
standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all 
nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made 
a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? 
I^ondon and Paris and New York must go the same way. 
'^What is History,'^ said Napoleon, ^'but a fable agreed 
upon?'^. This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, 
Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Com- 
merce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and 
gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in 
Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the 
Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each and of 
all eras in my own mind. 

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of his- 
tory in our private experience, and verifying them here. 
All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is 
properly no history, only biography. Every mind must 
know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole 
ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will 



HISTORY 61 

not know. What the former age has epitomized into a 
formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the 
good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. 
Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation 
for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered 
many things in astronomy which had long been known. The 
better for him. 

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which 
the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature ; that is all. 
We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — 
see how it could and must be. So stand before every public 
and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a vic- 
tory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 
of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign 
of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic 
Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Provi- 
dence. We assume that we under like influence should be 
ahke affected, and should achieve the like ; and we aim to 
master intellectually the steps, and reach the same height 
or the same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done. 

All inquiry into antiquity — all curiosity respecting the 
Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, 
Mexico, Memphis — is the desire to do away this wild, 
savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its 
place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in 
the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see 
the end of the difference between the monstrous work and 
himself. When he has satisfied himseK, in general and in 
detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and 
so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also 
have worked, the problem is solved ; his thought lives along 
the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes 
through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to 
the mind, or are now. 

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not 
done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our 
man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its produc- 
tion. We put ourselves into the place and state of the 
builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, 
the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as 
the wealth of the nation increased ; the value which is given 
to wood by carving led to the carving over the whole moun- 



62 HISTORY 

tain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through 
this process, and added thereto the CathoHc Church, its cross, 
its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, 
we have, as it were, been the man that made the minister; 
we have seen how it could and must be. We have the 
sufficient reason. 

The difference between men is in their principle of associa- 
tion. Some men classify objects by color and size and other 
accidents of appearance ; others by intrinsic likeness, or by 
the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect 
is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface dif- 
ferences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all 
things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days 
holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and 
slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every 
plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, 
the variety of appearance. 

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating 
nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be 
such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should 
we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? 
The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows 
how to play with them as a young child plays with gray- 
beards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, 
and far back, in the womb of things, sees the rays parting 
from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. 
Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he per- 
forms the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through 
the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through 
the egg, the constant individual ; through countless indi- 
viduals, the fixed species ; through many species, the genus ; 
through all genera, the steadfast type ; through all the king- 
doms of organized life, the eternal imity. Nature is a mu- 
table cloud, which is always and never the same. She casts 
the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes 
twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and 
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own 
will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before 
it, and whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed 
again. Nothing is so fleeting as form ; yet never does it quite 
deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all 
that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet 



HISTORY 63 

in him they enhance his nobleness and grace ; as lo, in ^Eschy- 
lus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination ; but how 
changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris- Jove, a 
beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left 
but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows ! 

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity 
equally obvious. There is at the surface infinite variety of 
things ; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many 
are the acts of one man in which we recognize the same char- 
acter! Observe the sources of our information In respect 
to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that people, 
as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xehophon, and Plutarch have 
given it ; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons 
they were, and what they did. We have the same national 
mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and 
lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. 
Then we have it once more in their architecture, sl beauty as of 
temperance itseK, limited to the straight line and the square, 
— a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in 
sculpture, the ^H.ongue on the balance of expression, '' a mul- 
titude of forms in the utmost freedom of action, and never 
transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing 
some religious dance before the gods, and, though in convul- 
sive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure 
and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one 
remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation: and 
to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a 
marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last 
actions of Phocion? 

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, 
without any resembling feature, make a like impression on 
the beholder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do 
not awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce 
the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although 
the resemblance is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult 
and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an 
endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She 
hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations. 

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her 
works ; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the 
most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old 
sachem of the forest, which at once reminded the eye of a 



64 HISTORY 

bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow sug- 
gested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners 
have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful 
sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of 
the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the 
same strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is 
Guidons RospigHosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the 
horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one will but 
take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is 
equally incHned in certain moods of mind, and those to which 
he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity. 

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without 
in some sort becoming a tree ; or draw a child by studying the 
outlines of its form merely, — but, by watching for a time 
his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature, and 
can then draw him at will in every attitude. So Roos ^^ en- 
tered into the inmost nature of a sheep.'' I knew a draughts- 
man employed in a public survey, who found that he could 
not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first 
explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the com- 
mon origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not 
the fact that is identical. By a deeper apprehension, and 
not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, 
the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a 
given activity. 

It has been said, that '^common souls pay with what they 
do; nobler souls with that which they are.'' And why? 
Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and 
words, by its very looks and manners, the same power and 
beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, addresses. 

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of htera- 
ture, must be explained from individual history, or must 
remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing 
that does not interest us, — kingdom, college, tree, horse, or 
iron shoe, the roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce 
and the dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine 
model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of 
the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's 
mind ; the true ship is the shipbuilder. In the man, could 
we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish 
and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea- 
shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole 



HISTORY 65 

of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine 
manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament 
that titles of nobility could ever add. 

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying 
some old prediction to us, and converting into things the 
words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. 
A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, 
that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii 
who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer 
has passed onward : a thought which poetry has celebrated in 
the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach 
of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon 
break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an 
archangel at the creation of light and of the world. I re- 
member one summer day, in the fields, my companion pointed 
out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a 
mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of 
a cherub as painted over churches, — a round block in the 
centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, 
supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. 
What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and 
it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. 
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at 
once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when 
they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have 
seen a snowdrift along the sides of the stone-wall which 
obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll 
to abut a tower. 

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, 
we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, 
as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive 
abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the 
wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese 
pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian 
temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of 
their forefathers. '^The custom of making houses and 
tombs in the living rock,'' says Heeren, in his researches on 
the Ethiopians, '^determined very naturally the principal 
character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal 
form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared 
by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes 
and masses, so that when art/ came to the assistance of nature. 



66 HISTORY 

it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself. 
What would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and 
wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls before 
which only Colossi could sit as watchman, or lean on the 
pillars of the interior ?'' 

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation 
of the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn 
arcade, as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the 
green Tvdthes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut 
through pine woods, without being struck with the archi- 
tectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when 
the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the 
Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as 
readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which 
the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western 
sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. 
Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and 
the Enghsh cathedrals, without feehng that the forest over- 
powered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, 
and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its 
locust, ehn, oalv, pine, fir, and spruce. 

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by 
the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain 
of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the Hghtness 
and deHcate finish, as weU as the aerial proportions and per- 
spective, of vegetable beauty. 

In like manner, all pubHc facts are to be individualized, 
all private facts are to be generahzed. Then at once History 
becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. 
As the Persian imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of 
his architecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so 
the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave over the 
nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecba- 
tana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer, and to 
Babylon for the wdnter. 

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and 
Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of 
Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the 
nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil, or the ad- 
vantages of a market, had induced to build towns. Agri- 
culture, therefore, was a rehgious injunction, because of the 
perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and 



I 



HISTORY 67 

civil countries of England and America, these propensities 
still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the individual. 
The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the 
attacks of the gadfly, which drives the cattle mad, and so 
compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to 
drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads 
of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In 
America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity ; 
a progress, certainly, from the gadfly of Astaboras to the 
Anglo and Italomania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities,;^to 
which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or 
stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national 
bond, were the check on the old rovers ; and the cumulative 
values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of 
the present day.. The antagonism of the two tendencies is 
not less active in individuals, as the love of adventure or the 
love of repose happens to predominate. A man of rude 
health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domesti- 
cation, lives in his wagon, and roams through all latitudes as 
easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, 
he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and asso- 
ciates as happily, as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps 
his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his 
faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest 
wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations 
were needy and hungry to desperation ; and this intellectual 
nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind, through the 
dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home- 
keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence or content 
which finds all the elements of life in its own soil ; and which 
has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not 
stimulated by foreign infusions. 

Everything the individual sees without him corresponds to 
his states of mind, and everything is in turn intelligible to 
him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which 
that fact or series belongs. 

The primeval world, — the Fore- World, as the Germans 
say, — I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with 
researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken 
reliefs and torsos of ruined villas. 

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in 
Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from 



68 HISTORY 

the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic hfe of the 
Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What 
but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian 
period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, 
the perfection of the senses, — of the spiritual nature un- 
folded in strict unity with the body. In it existed those 
human forms which suppHed the sculptor with his models of 
Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not hke the forms abounding 
in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused 
blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, 
and sjnnametrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed 
that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint, and take 
furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn 
the whole head. The manners of that period are plain and 
fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal quahties, 
courage, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, 
a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxmy and elegance are not 
known. A sparse population and want make every man his 
own valet, cook, butcher, and soldier, and the habit of supply- 
ing his own needs educates the body to wonderful perform- 
ances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, 
and not far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself 
and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. 
'^ After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, 
there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the 
ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and, 
taking an axe,- began to spUt wood; whereupon others rose 
and did the like." Throughout his army exists a boundless 
liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle 
with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as 
sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than most, and 
so gives as good as he gets. ^Tio does not see that this is a 
gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax 
discipline as great boys have ? 

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all 
the old hterature, is, that the persons speak simply, — speak 
as persons who have great good sense without knowing it, 
before yet the reflective habit has become the predominant 
habit of the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not 
admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are 
not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, 
with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults 



HISTORY 69 

acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made 
vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should, 
— that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be 
made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique 
exists ; but as a class, from their superior organization, they 
have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood 
with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attrac- 
tion of these manners is that they belong to man, and are 
known to every man in virtue of his being once a child; 
besides that there are always individuals who retain these 
characteristics. A person of childUke genius and inborn 
energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of 
Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In 
reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, 
mountains, and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing 
sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. 
The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow beings as I. The 
sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they 
meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek 
and EngHsh, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems 
superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes 
a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar 
fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in 
a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, 
and do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees 
of latitude, why should I count Egyptian 3^ears? 

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of 
chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circum- 
navigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. 
To the sacred history of the world, he has the same key. 
When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity 
merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of 
his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the con- 
fusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. 

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who 
disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God 
have, from time to time, wall<:ed among men and made their 
conmiission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest 
hearer. Hence, evidently, the tripod, the priest, the priestess 
inspired by the divine afflatus. 

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They 
cannot imite him to history, or reconcile him with them- 



70 HISTORY 

selves. As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire 
to hve hoHly, their own piety explains every fact, every word. 

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of 
Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I 
cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much 
as theirs. 

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing 
seas or centuries. More than once some individual has 
appeared to me with such negligence of labor and such com- 
manding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in 
the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century 
Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins. 

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, 
Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individuaFs 
private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on 
a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing 
the understanding, and that without producing indignation, 
but only fear and obedience, and even much s^mipathy Tv^th 
the tyranny, — is a familiar fact explained to the child when 
he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his 
youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and 
words and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ 
to the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus was wor- 
shipped, and how the Pyramids were built, better than the 
discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmen 
and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds 
of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses. 

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes 
against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step 
the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds 
like them new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral 
vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great 
licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How 
many times in the history of the world has the Luther of the 
day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household ! 
'^Doctor,'' said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, ^4iow is 
it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and 
with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost cold- 
ness and very seldom?'' 

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has 
in literature, — in all fable as well as in all history. He finds 
that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and 



HISTORY 71 

impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his 
pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret 
biography he finds- in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, 
dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes 
up in his private adventures v/ith every fable of ^sop, of 
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and veri- 
fies them with his own head and hands. 

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations 
of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. 
What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has 
the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the 
first chapter of the history of Europe (the mythology thinly 
veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, 
and the migration of colonies), it gives the history of religion 
with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus 
is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man ; 
stands between the unjust ^^ justice '^ of the Eternal Father 
and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their 
account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic Chris- 
tianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a 
state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of 
Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems 
the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely, a dis- 
content with the beheved fact that a God exists, and a feeling 
that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal, 
if it could, the fire of the Creator, and live apart from him, 
and independent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the 
romance of scepticism. Not less true to all time are the de- 
tails of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of 
Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men, 
they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shaks- 
peare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of 
Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth, his 
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and, in all 
his weakness, both his body and his mind are invigorated 
by habits of conversation with nature. The power of music, 
the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to 
sohd nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philo- 
sophical perception of identity through endless mutations of 
form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who 
laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, 
and this morning stood and ran ? And what see I on any side 



72 HISTORY 

but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my 
thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, 
because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is j 
but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impos-|l 
sibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always; 
gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. The trans- 
migration of souls is no fable. I would it were ; but men and 
women are only half human. Every animal of the barn- - 
yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and of the waters 
that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and I 
to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other : 
of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah ! brother, stop j 
the ebb of thy soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into j 
whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near 
and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was \ 
said to sit in the roadside and put riddles to every passenger. ; 
If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he i 
could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our ! 
life but an endless flight of winged facts or events ! In splen- i 
did variety these changes come, all putting questions to the 
human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior 
wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts 
encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of 
routine the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts j 
has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is 
truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or ' 
sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that ' 
comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul and sees the : 
principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places ; j 
they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies ; 
him. 

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word , 
should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, ; 
Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do ! 
exert a specific influence on the mind. So far then are they 
eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much \ 
revolving them, he writes out freely his humor, and gives 
them body to his own imagination. And although that poem j 
be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more i 
attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same ) 
author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful rehef to I 
the mind from the routine of customary images, — awakens i 



HISTORY 73 

the reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the 
design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of 
surprise. 

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of 
the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand ; so 
that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, 
the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that ^^poets- 
utter great and wise things which they do not themselves^ 
understand. '^ All the fictions of the Middle Age explain 
themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in 
grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. 
Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment 
of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of 
sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the 
secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds^- 
are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The 
preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, 
and the like, are alike the endeavor of the human spirit ^'to 
bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.'' 

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose 
bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow 
of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, 
even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of vir- 
tuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Genelas; and^ 
indeed, all the postulates of elfin annals, — that the fairies 
do not like to be named ; that their gifts are capricious and not 
to be trusted ; that who seeks a treasure must not speak ; and 
the like, — I find true in Concord, however they might be in 
Cornwall or Bretagne. 

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride 
of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar 
temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud pov- 
erty, and the foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise 
for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that 
would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the 
unjust apd sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidel- 
ity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity 
in this world. 

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, 
another history goes daily forward, — that of the external 
world, — in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is 



74 HISTORY 

the compend of time; he is also the correlative of nature. 
His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the 
fact that his life is interwined with the whole chain of organic 
and inorganic being. In old Rome the pubhc roads begin- -I 
ning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the ' 
centre of every province of the empire, making each market- j 
town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers I 
of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, ] 
highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce j 
it imder the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of rela- \ 
tions, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. | 
His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world j 
he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water 
exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He 
cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island 
prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to 
climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air and i 
appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense 
population, complex interests, and antagonist power, and you : 
shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a 
profile and out fine, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but 
Talbot's shadow ; 

'^His substance is not here : 
For what you see is but the smallest part 
And least proportion of humanity ; 
But were the whole frame here, 
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, 
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it." i 

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. New- i 
ton and Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strewn celes- \ 
tial areas. One may say a gra^dtating solar system is already \ 
prophesied in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does ! 
the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring ] 
the affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws j 
of organization. Does not the eye of the human embryo j 
predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft 
of harmonic sound ? Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, ' 
Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, 
and temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, 
water, and wood? Do not the lovely aiJeributes of the j 
maiden child predict the refinements and decorations of civil j 



HISTORY 75 

society ? Here also we are reminded of the action of man on 
man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not 
gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach 
it in a day. Who knows himseK before he has been thrilled 
with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent 
tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national 
exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience, 
or guess what faculty or feeUng a new object shall unlock, any 
more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he 
shall see to-morrow for the first time. 

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore 
the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the 
light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and 
that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written. 

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce 
its treasures for each pupil. He, too, shall pass through the 
whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the 
rays of nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It 
shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall 
not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes 
you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you 
have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall 
walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe 
painted all over with wonderful events and experiences ; his 
own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall be 
that variegated vest. I shall find in him the Fore-world ; 
in his childhood the Age of Gold ; the Apples of Knowledge ; 
the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of Abraham; the 
building of the Temple ; the Advent of Christ ; Dark Ages ; 
the Revival of Letters ; the Reformation ; the discovery of 
new lands ; the opening of new sciences, and new regions in 
man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into 
humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars and all 
the recorded benefits of heaven and earth. 

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I 
reject all I have written, for what is the use of pretending 
to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our 
rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seem- 
*ing to belie s'ome other. I hold our actual knowledge very 
cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, 
the fungus under foot, the Uchen on the log. What do I 
' know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of 



76 HISTORY 

life ? As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older, — these 
creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no 
record of any word or sign that has passed from one to the 
other. What connection do the books show between the 
fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? 
Nay, what does history yet record of the metaphysical annals 
of man? What light does it shed on those mysteries which 
we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet 
every history should be ^Titten in a wisdom which divined 
the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I 
am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called 
History is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, 
and Constantinople ! What does Rome know of rat and 
lizard ? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neigh- 
boring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or 
succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the 
Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the 
porter ? 

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — from an 
ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever 
sanative conscience, — if we would truly express our central 
and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of 
selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. 
Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, 
but the path of science and of letters is not the way into 
nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled 
farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to 
be read, than the dissector or the antiquary. 



SELF-RELIANCE 

''Ne te qusesiveris extra." 

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate ; 
Nothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." 

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortunes^ 

Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat ; 
Wintered with the hawk and fox. 
Power and speed be hands and feet. 

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent 
painter which were original and not conventional. The soul 
always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be 
what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than 
any thought they may contain. To believe your own 
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private 
heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your 
latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense ; for the 
inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first 
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last 
Judgm^ent. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, 
the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, 
that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not 
♦what men but what they thought. A man should learn to 
detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his 
mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament 
of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his 
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we 
recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us. 

77 



78 SELF-RELIANCE 

with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have 
no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to 
abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored 
inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on 
the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with 
masterl}^ good sense precisely what we have thought and felt 
all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our 
own opinion from another. 

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives 
at the conviction that enw is ignorance ; that imitation is 
suicide ; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as 
his portion ; that though the \\dde universe is full of good, no 
kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his 
toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to 
till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and 
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he 
know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one 
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and 
another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without 
pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray 
should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We 
but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine 
idea which each of us represents. It may be safeh^ trusted 
as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faitMully un- 
paged, but God will not have his work made manifest by 
cowards. A man is reheved and gay when he has put his 
heart into his work and done his best ; but what he has said 
or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliver- 
ance which does not dehver. In the attempt his genius 
deserts him ; no muse befriends ; no invention, no hope. 

Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string. 
Accept the place the divine pro\adence has found for you, 
the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. 
Great men have always done so, and confided themselves 
childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception 
that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, 
working through their hands, predominating in all their be- 
ing. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest 
mind the same transcendent destiny ; and not minors and 
invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a 
revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying 
the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. 



SELF-RELIANCE 79 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the 
face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes ! That 
divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because 
our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed 
to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, 
their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their 
faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: 
all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or 
five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has 
armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own 
piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and 
its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not 
think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you 
and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently 
clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his 
contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to 
make us seniors very unnecessary. 

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and 
would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to con- 
ciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy 
is in the parlor wha^t the pit is in the playhouse ; independent^ 
irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and 
facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, 
in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, 
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himseK never 
about consequences, about interests ; he gives an independent, 
genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court 
you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his con- 
sciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with 
eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy 
or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter 
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he 
could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid 
all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the 
same unaffected, unbiassed, unbribable, unaffrighted inno- 
cence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions 
on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but 
necessary, would sink like dartS'^into the ear of men, and put 
them in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they 
grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society 
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every 



80 SELF-RELIANCE 

one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in 
wliich the members agree, for the better securing of his bread 
to each shareholder, to surrender the hberty and culture of 
the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self- 
reliance is its aversion. It loves not reahties and creators, 
but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He 
who would gather immortal pahns must not be hindered byl 
the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. 
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of] 
the world. I remember an answer which when quite young' 
I was prompted to make to a valued ad^dser, who was wont 
to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church 
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of 
traditions, if I hve wholly from within ? my friend suggested 
''But these impulses may be from below, not from above." 
I replied : 'They do not seem to- me to be such ; but if I am 
the Devil's child, I will Hve then from the Devil.' No law 
can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad 
are but names very readily transferable to that or this ; the 
only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong 
what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence 
of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral 
but him. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate 
to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. 
Every decent and weU-spoken indi\ddual affects and sways 
me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and 
speak the rude truth in all ways. If mahce and vanity wear 
the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot 
assumes this bountiful cause of AboHtion, and comes to me 
wdth his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to 
him : ' Go love thy infant ; love th}'' wood-chopper : be good- 
natured and modest : have that grace ; and never varnish 
your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible ten- 
derness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar 
is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greet- 
ing, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. 
Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. 
The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counter- 
action of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. 
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my 



ii 



1 



SELF-RELIANCE 81 

genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door- 
post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, 
but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not 
to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, 
again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obli- 
gation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my 
poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge 
the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not 
belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class 
of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and 
sold ; for them I will go to prison, if need be ; but your miscel- 
laneous popular charities ; the education at college of fools ; 
the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many 
now stand ; alms to sots ; and the thousand-fold Relief Soci- 
eties ; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb 
and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I 
shall have the manhood to withhold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception 
than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do 
what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or 
charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily 
non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an 
apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as 
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are 
penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is 
for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should 
be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it 
should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound 
and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary 
evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the 
man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no 
difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are 
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege 
where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may 
be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance 
or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the 
people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in 
intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between 
greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will 
always find those who think they know what is your duty 
better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live 



82 SELF-RELIANCE \ 

after the world's opinion ; it is easy in solitude to live after our I 
own ; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd : 
keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. \ 
The objection to conforming to usages that have become j 
dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time j 
and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain | 
a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible society, vote with \ 
a great party either for the government or against it, spread | 
your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens i 
I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of j 
course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. ^ 
But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and ; 
you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what aj 
blind-man's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your j 
sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce | 
for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions 
of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly j 
can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know 
that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the 
institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that 
he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the 
permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He 
is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the 
emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes 
with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves 
to some one of these communities of opinion. This con- 
formity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of 
a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is 
not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their foiu* is not 
the real four ; so that every word they say chagrins us, and 
we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime 
nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the 
party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face 
and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine ex-j 
pression. There is a mortifying experience in particular,' 
which does not fail to wreck itself also in the general history ; 
I mean 'Hhe foolish face of praise,'' the forced smile which we 
put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to 
conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not 
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilful- 
ness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most 
disagreeable sensation. 



SELF-RELIANCE 83 

For non-conformity the world whips you with its dis- 
pleasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate 
a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the 
public street or in the friend's parlor. If this aversion had 
its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might 
well go home with a sad countenance ; but the sour faces of 
the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, 
but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper 
directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more for- 
midable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy 
enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage 
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and pru- 
dent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. 
But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people 
is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when 
the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society 
is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magna- 
nimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no con- 
cernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our. con- 
sistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the 
eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit 
than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? 
Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you con- 
tradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public 
place ? Suppose you should contradict yourself ; what then ? 
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory 
alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the 
past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live 
ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied 
personality to the Deity: yet when the devout m.otions of 
the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they 
should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, 
as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little* minds, 
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. 
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He 
may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 
Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow 
speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it 
contradict everything you said to-day. — ''Ah, so you shall 



84 SELF-RELIANCE 

be sure to be misunderstood ?'' — Is it so bad, then, to be 
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Soc- 
rates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo,^ 
and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever too' ' 
flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the salliei 
of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the 
inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the 
curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and 
try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian 
stanza ; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells 
the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which 
God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought 
without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will 
be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. 
My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of 
insects. The swallow over my window should interweave 
that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. 
We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. 
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue • or vice 
only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit 
a breath every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, 
so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one 
will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they 
seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at 
a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. 
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred 
tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it 
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine 
action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine 
actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and 
what you have already done singly will justify you now. 
Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough 
to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much 
right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right 
now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The 
force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of 
virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty 
of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the 
imagination ? The consciousness of a train of great days and 
victories behind. They shed a united light on the advanc- 



I 

1 



SELF-RELIANCE 85 

ing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels^ 
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and 
dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's 
eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. 
It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because 
it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage, because 
it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self -dependent^ 
self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree^ 
even if shown in a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity I 
and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous 
henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a- 
whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize 
more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not 
wish to please him ; I wish that he should wish to please me. 
I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it 
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand 
the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times ^ 
and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact 
which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great re- 
sponsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works ; 
that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the 
centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures 
you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, everybody in 
society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. 
Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else ; it takes place 
of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he 
must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a. 
cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and 
numbers and time fully to accomplish his design ; — and 
posterity seems to follow his steps as a train of clients. A 
man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman 
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and 
cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and 
the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow 
of one man ; as Monachism, of the Hermit Antony ; the 
Reformation, of Luther ; Quakerism, of Fox ; Methodism, of 
Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called 'Hhe 
height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily 
into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his 
feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with 



86 SELF-RELIANCE 

the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the 
woHd which exists for him. But the man in the street, 
finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force 
which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor 
when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a 
costly book has an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay 
equipage, and seems to say hke that, 'Who are 3^ou sir?^ 
Yet they all are his suitors for his notice, petitioners to his 
faculties that they mil come out and take possession. The 
picture waits for my verdict : it is not to command me, but I 
am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the 
sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to 
the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's 
bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious cere- 
mony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, 
owes its popularity to the fact, that it s^mibolizes so well the 
state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and 
then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true 
prince. 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, 
our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, 
power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John 
and Edward in a small house and common day's work ; but 
the things of Hfe are the same to both ; the sum total of both 
are the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scan- 
derbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did 
they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your 
private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned 
steps. When private men shall act with original views, the 
lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those 
of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so 
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this 
colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man 
to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have every- 
where suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to 
walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of 
men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with 
money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, 
was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their 
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right 
of every man. 



SELF-RELIANCE 87 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained 
when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee ? 
What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may 
be grounded ? What is the nature and power of that science- 
baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements^ 
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial' and impure 
actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The 
inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius^ 
of virtue, and of hfe, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. 
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later 
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact be- 
hind which analysis cannot go, aU things find their common 
origin. For, the sense of being which in cahn hours rises,, 
we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, 
from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with 
them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence 
their life and being also proceed. We first share the hfe by 
which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances 
in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here 
is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs 
of that inspiration which giveth m^an wisdom, and which 
cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We He in 
the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of 
its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, 
when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow 
a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we 
seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. 
Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man 
discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his 
involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary 
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expres- 
sion of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day 
and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and ac- 
quisitions are but roving ; — the idlest revery, the faintest 
native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. 
Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statements of 
perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily ; for, 
they do not distinguish between perception and notion. 
They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But per- 
ception is not whimsical, it is fatal. If I see a trait, my 
children will see it after me, and in course of time, all man- 
kind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it be- 



88 SELF-RELIANCE M 

fore me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as 
the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, 
that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that 
when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, 
but all things; should fill the world \\dth his voice; should 
i5catter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the 
present thought ; and new date and new create the whole. 
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, 
old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples, fall ; 
it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. 
All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as 
another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their 
cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular 
miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and 
speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology 
of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another 
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak 
which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better 
than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? 
Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are 
conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. 
Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye 
makes, but the soul is light ; where it is, is day ; where it. was, 
is night ; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be 
anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my 
being and becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer upright ; he 
dares not say, 'I think, ^ ^I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. 
He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. 
These roses under my window make no reference to former 
roses or to better ones ; they are for what they are ; they exist 
with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is 
simply the rose ; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts ; in the full- 
blown flower there is no more ; in the leafless root there is no 
less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all 
moments alike. But man postpones or remembers ; he does 
not Hve in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, 
or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tip- 
toe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong 
until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. 



SELF-RELIANCE 89 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intel- 
lects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the 
phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. 
We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a 
few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the 
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, 
of the men of talents and character they chance to see, — 
painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke ; afterwards, 
when they come into the point of ^dew which those had who 
uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing 
to let the words go ; for, at any time, they can use words as 
good when occasion comes. If we Hve truly, we shall see 
truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is 
for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we 
shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as 
old rubbish. When a man hves with God, his voice shall be 
as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains 
unsaid ; probably cannot be said ; for all that we say is the 
far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what 
I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is 
near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any 
known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot- 
prints of any other ; you shall not see the face of man ; you 
shall not hear any name ; the way, the thought, the good, 
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example 
and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. 
All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. 
Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low 
even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that 
can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised 
over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, per- 
ceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself 
with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, 
the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals of time, 
years, centuries, — are of no account.- This which I think 
and feel underlay every fonner state of life and circumstances, 
as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and 
what is called death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in 
the instant of repose ; it resides in the moment of transition 
from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the 



90 SELF-RELIANCE 

darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the 
soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all 
riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the 
saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. 
Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the 
soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. 
To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak 
rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who 
has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not 
raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravi- 
tation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of 
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, 
and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable 
to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride 
all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quicldy reach on this, 
as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed 
One. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, 
and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which 
it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so 
much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunt- 
ing, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, 
and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure 
action. I see the same law working in nature for conserva- 
tion and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure 
of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms 
which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a 
planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself 
from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and 
vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and, 
therefore, self-relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates ; let us not rove ; let us sit at home 
with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding 
rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declara- 
tion of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from 
off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity 
judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the 
poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of 
man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put 
itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes 
abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We 



SELF-RELIANCE 91 

must go alone. I like the silent church before the service 
begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,, 
how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct 
or sanctuary ! So let us always sit. Why should we assume 
the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because 
they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood ? 
All men have my blood, and I have all men^s. Not for that 
will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of 
being ashamed of it. But the isolation must not be mechan- 
ical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the 
whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you witk 
emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, siclaiess, fear, want, 
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, ' Come 
out unto us.' But keep thy state ; come not into their con- 
fusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them 
by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through 
my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we 
bereave ourselves of the love.'' 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and 
faith, let us at least resist our temptations ; let us enter into 
the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and 
constancy in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our 
smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying 
hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expec- 
tation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we 
converse. Say to them, father, mother, wife, O 
brother, friend, I have lived with you after appearances- 
hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known 
unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal 
law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall en- 
deavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be 
the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must 
fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your 
customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any 
longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we 
shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to de- 
serve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. 
I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly 
before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the 
heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you ; if you are 
not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. 
If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave ta 



92 SELF-RELIANCE 

your companions ; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, 
1)ut humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, 
and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live 
in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon 
love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, 
if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. But 
so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell 
my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, 
all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out 
into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, 
and do the same thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards 
is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism ; and 
the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild 
liis crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There 
are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must 
Toe shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing 
yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether 
you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, 
neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can 
upbraid 3^ou. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, 
and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and 
perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices 
"that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it 
enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one 
imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment 
one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has 
cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured 
to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful 
his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doc- 
trine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be 
to him as strong as iron necessity is to 6thers ! 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called 
by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. 
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are 
become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid 
of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of 
each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. 
We want men and women who shall renovate life and our 
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, can- 
not satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all 



SELF-RELIANCE 93 

proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day 
and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our 
arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have 
not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor 
soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength 
is born. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they 
lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is 
ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and 
is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the 
cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his 
friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, 
and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from 
New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the pro- 
fessions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, 
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a town- 
ship, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a 
cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. 
He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 
'studying a profession,^ for he does not postpone his life, but 
lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. 
Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are 
not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; 
that with the exercise of self -trust, new powers shall appear ; 
that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to 
the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, 
and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, 
the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we 
pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that 
teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make 
his name dear to all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a 
revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their 
religion ; in their education ; in their pursuits ; their modes of 
living; their association; in their property; in their specu- 
lative views. 

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That 
which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and 
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign ad- 
dition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself 
in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediato- 
rial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular com- 



94 SELF-RELIANCE 

modity, — anything less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer 
is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest 
point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant 
soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. 
But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and 
theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and con- 
sciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will 
not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer 
of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the 
rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers 
heard throughout nature though for cheap ends. Caratach, 
in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind 
of the god Audate, replies, — 

^^His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; 
Our valors are our best gods." 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent 
is the want of self-reliance : it is infirmity of will. Regret 
calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer : if not, attend 
your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. 
Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep 
foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of im- 
parting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, 
putting them once more in communication with their own 
reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome 
evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him 
all doors are flung wide : him all tongues greet, all honors 
crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him 
and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solici- 
tously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because 
he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The 
gods love him because men hated him. ''To the persevering 
mortal, '^ said Zoroaster, ''the blessed Immortals are swift.'' 

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their 
creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish 
Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us lest we die. Speak thou, 
speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am 
hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut 
his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's 
or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new 
classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and 
power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, 



SELF-RELIANCE 95 

it imposes its classifioation on other men, and lo! a new 
system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so 
to the number of the objects it touches and brings within 
reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this 
apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifica- 
tions of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought 
of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Cal- 
vinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the 
same delight in subordinating everything to the new termi- 
nology, as a girl who has just learned botan}^ in seeing a new 
earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, 
that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by 
the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, 
the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a 
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system 
blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the 
universe ; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the 
arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens 
have any right to see, — how you can see; 4t must be 
somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet 
perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break 
into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and 
call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently 
their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, 
^dll lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all 
young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam 
over the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self-reliance that the superstition of 
Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its 
fascination for all educated Americans. They who made 
England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did 
so b}^ sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. 
In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is 
no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his 
necessities, his duties, on any occasion, call him from his 
house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall 
make men sensible, by the expression of his countenance, that 
he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities 
and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of 
the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, 
BO that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad 



96 SELF-RELIANCE 

with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. 
He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he 
does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old 
even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, 
his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. 
He carries ruins to ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys dis- 
cover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that 
at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and 
lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, 
embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there 
beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, 
that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I 
affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I 
am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper 
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The 
intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters 
restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced 
to stay at home. We imitate ; and what is imitation but the 
travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign 
taste ; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments ; our 
opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past 
and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they 
have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist 
sought his model. It was an application of his own thought 
to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. 
And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? 
Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint ex- 
pression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist 
will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by 
him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, 
the wants of the people, the habit and form of the govern- 
ment, he will create a house in which all these will find them- 
selves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can 
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole 
life's cultivation ; but of the adopted talent of another, you 
have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which 
each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No 
man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has ex- 
hibited it. Where is the master who could have taught 



SELF-RELIANCE 97 

Shakspeare ? T\niere is the master who could have instructed 
Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every^ 
great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely 
that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be 
made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned 
you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There 
is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand a^ 
that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyp- 
tians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from alf 
these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with 
thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself ; but if you can 
hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them 
in the same pitch of voice ; for the ear and the tongue are two 
organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions 
of thy life, obej^ thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the 
Fore world again. 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad,, 
so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on 
the improvement of society, and no man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side 
as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes ; it 
is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is 
scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every- 
thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires 
new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between 
the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a 
watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the 
naked New-Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a 
mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under t 
But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see 
that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the 
traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and 
in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck 
the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the 
white to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use 
of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much 
support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails 
of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical 
almanac he has^ and so being sure of the information when 
he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the 
sky. The solstice he does not observe, the equinox he knows 




98 SELF-RELIANCE 

as little ; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without' 
Si dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory ; his 
libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the 
number of accidents ; and it may be a question whether ma- 
chinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by 
refinement some energy, by a Christianity intrenched in 
establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For 
every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the 
Christian ? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than 
in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now 
than ever were. A singular equality may be observed be- 
tween the great men of the first and of the last ages ; nor can 
all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth 
century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, 
three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race 
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, yAnaxagor as, Diogenes, are 
great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their 
class mil not be called by their name, but will be his own 
man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and 
inventions of each period"^ are only its costume, and do not 
invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may 
compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished 
so much in their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and 
Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science 
and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more 
splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since 
Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is 
curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means 
and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation 
a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns 
to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art 
of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon 
conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling 
back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids. The 
Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says 
Las Cases, '^without abolishing our arms, magazines, com- 
missaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman 
custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind 
it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.'' 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the 
water of which it is composed does not. The same particle 



SELF-RELIANCE 99 

does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only 
phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, 
next year die, and their experience with them. 

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on 
governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. 
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so 
long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, 
and civil institutions as guards of property, and they depre- 
cate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults 
on property. They measure their esteem of each other by 
what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated 
man becomes ashamed of his property, out Qf new respect 
for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see 
that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or 
crime ; then he feels that it is not having ; it does not belong 
to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no 
revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a 
man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man 
acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of 
rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bank- 
ruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man 
breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,^^ said the Caliph AH, 
"is seeking after thee ; therefore be at rest from seeking after 
it.'' Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our 
slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in 
numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with 
each new uproar of announcement, — The delegation from 
Essex ! The Democrats from New Hampshire ! The Whigs 
of Maine ! — the young patriot feels himself stronger than 
before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner 
the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in 
multitude. Not so, friends, will the God deign to enter and 
inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is 
^only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, 
that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by 
every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a 
town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, 
thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder 
of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is 
inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out 
of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself un- 
hesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands 



100 SELF-RELIANCE 

in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; 
just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man 
who stands on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with 
lier, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou 
leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and 
Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, 
:and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit 
hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, 
a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your 
absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your 
spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do 
not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. 
]N"othing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 

The living Heaven thy prayers respect, 
House at once and architect, 
Quarrying man's rejected hours, 
Builds therewith eternal towers ; 
Soul and self -commanded works, 
Fears not undermining days, 
Grows by decays, 

And, by the famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil. 
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil ; 
Forging, through swart arms of Offence, 
The silver seat of Innocence. 

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when 
we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that 
our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all 
things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not 
only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, 
are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory. 
The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, 
the fooHsh person, — however neglected in the passing, — 
have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in 
the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. 
The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If, in the 
hours of clear reason, we should speak the severest truth, 
we should say, that we had never made a sacrifice. In these 
hours the mind seems so great, that nothing can be taken 
from us that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular; 
the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations 
nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his 
griefs as hghtly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in 
the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. 
For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered ; the 
infinite lies stretched in smiling repose. 

101 



102 SPIRITUAL LAWS S 

li 
The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if H 
man will live the life of nature, and not import into his I 
mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be.! 
perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what.j 
strictly belongs to him, and, though very ignorant of books, i 
his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions 
and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theo- 
logical problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, 
and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty 
to any man, — never darkened across any man's road, who 
did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's 
mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs, and those who 
have not caught them cannot describe their health or pre- 
scribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. 
It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account 
of his faith, and expound to another the theory of his self- 
union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet, without 
this self-knowledge, there may be a sylvan strength and 
integrity in that which he is. ^'A few strong instincts and 
a few plain rules" suffice us. 

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they 
now take. The regular course of studies, the years of acade- 
mical and professional education, have not yielded me better 
facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin 
School. What we do not call education is more precious 
than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time 
of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And 
education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and 
balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what 
belongs to it. 

In like manner, our moral nature is vitiated by any inter- 
ference of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle,, 
and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, 
and the question is everywhere vexed, when a noble nature 
is commended, whether the man is not better w^ho strives 
with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. 
Either God is there, or he is not there. We love characters \ 
in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The 
less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we 
like him. Timoleon's victories are the best victories, — 
which ran and flowed like Homer's verses, Plutarch said. 
When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 103 

pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can 
be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel, and say, ^ Crump 
is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native 
devils/ 

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over 
will in all practical life. There is less intention in history 
than we ascribe to it. We impute deep-laid, far-sighted 
plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of their power 
was in nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, 
in their honest moments, have always sung, ^Not unto us, 
not unto us.' According to the faith of their times, they 
have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Juhan. 
Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, 
which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the 
wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed 
to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism? 
It is even true that there was less in them on which they 
could reflect, than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to 
be smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed will 
and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation. 
Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare? Could 
ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey to 
others any insight into his methods? If he could com- 
municate that secret, it would instantly lose its exaggerated 
value, blending with the daylight and the vital energy, the 
power to stand and to go. 

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations, that 
our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it ; 
that the world might be a happier place than it is ; that there 
is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the 
wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that 
we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism 
of nature ; for, whenever we get this vantage-ground of the 
past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern 
that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves. 

The face of eternal nature teaches the same lesson. Nature 
will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevo- 
lence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds 
and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, 
or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance meeting, 
I or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she 
says to us, 'So hot? my little sir.' 



104 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs inter- 
meddle, and have things in our own way, until the sacrifices 
and virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy; 
but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday schools and 
churches and pauper societies are yokes to the neck. We 
pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of 
arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not 
arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the same 
way? Why should all give dollars? It is very incon- 
venient to us country folk, and we do not think any good 
will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; 
let them give them. Farmers will give corn ; poets will sing ; 
women will sew ; laborers will lend a hand ; the children will 
bring flowers. And why drag this dead- weight of a Sunday 
school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and 
beautiful that childhood should inquire, and maturity should 
teach : but it is time enough to answer questions when they 
are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their 
will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions 
for an hour against their will. 

If we look wider, things are all alike; laws, and letters, 
and creeds, and modes of living seem a travesty of truth. 
Our society is encumbered by ponderous machinery, which 
resembles the endless aqueducts which the Romans built 
over hill and dale, and which are superseded b}'- the dis- 
covery of the law that water rises to the level of its source. 
It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap over. 
It is a standing army, not so good as a peace. It is a gradu- 
ated, titled, richly appointed empire, quite superfluous when 
town-meetings are found to answer just as well. 

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works 
by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the 
fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters 
is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a 
falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, 
as prying, splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done 
by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, 
comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever. 

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the 
simplicity of a machine. He who sees moral nature out and 
out, and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and 
character formed, is a pedant. The simpUcity of nature 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 105 

is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. 
The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man's 
wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the 
inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. The 
wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names 
and reputations with our fluid consciousness. We pass in 
the world for sects and schools, for erudition and piety, and 
we are all the time jejune babes. One sees very well how 
Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middle 
point, whereof everything may be affirmed and denied with 
equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is 
altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say of 
the seraphim, and of the tin-pedler. There is no permanent 
wise man, except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with 
the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and the 
robber ; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, 
and shall be again, not in the low circumstance, but in com- 
parison with the grandeurs possible to the soul. 

A little consideration of what takes place around us every 
day would show us, that a higher law than that of our will 
regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary, 
and fruitless ; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous 
action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with 
obedience we become divine. Belief and love, — a believing 
love will relieve us of a vast load of care. my brothers, 
God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over 
the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the 
universe. It has so infused its strong enchantment into 
nature, that we prosper when we accept its advice, and when 
we struggle to wound its creatures, our hands are glued to 
our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course 
of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There 
is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall 
hear the right word. Why need you choose so painfully 
your place, and occupation, and associates, and modes of 
action, and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible 
right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful 
election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial 
duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power 
and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are 
without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect 
contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. 



106 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of 
beauty. If we will not be mar-plots with our miserable 
interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, 
religion of men would go on far better than now, and the 
heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still 
predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize 
itself, as do now the rose, and the air, and the sun. 

I say, do not choose ; but that is a figure of speech by which 
\ I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among 
men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of 
the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. 
But that which I call right or goodness is the choice of my 
constitution; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly 
aspire after, is the state or circumstance desirable to my 
constitution ; and the action which I in all my years tend 
to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a man 
amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or 
profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds, 
that they are the custom of his trade. What business has 
he with an evil trade ? Has he not a calling in his character ? 

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. 
There is one direction in which all space is open to him. 
He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless 
exertion. He is like a ship in a river ; he runs against ob- 
structions on every side but one ; on that side all obstruction 
is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening 
channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend 
on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul 
incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which 
is easy to him, and good when it is done, but which no other 
man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he con- 
sults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit 
from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly pro- 
portioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is 
determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has 
this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man 
has any other call. The pretence that he has another call, 
a summons by name and personal election and outward 
'^ signs that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of 
common men,'' is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to 
perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and 
no respect of persons therein. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 107 

By doing his work, he makes the need felt which he can 
supply, and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. By 
doing his own work, he unfolds himself. It is the vice of 
our public speaking that it has not abandonment. Some- 
where, not only every orator but every man should let out 
all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank 
and hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him. 
The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well 
\ as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he 
falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part 
of the machine he moves; the man is lost. Until he can 
manavge to communicate himself to others in his full stature 
and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must 
find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify 
his work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let him by his 
thinking and character make it liberal. Whatever* he knows 
and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, 
that let him communicate, or men will never know and honor 
him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and 
formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into 
the obedient spiracle of your character and aims. 

We like only such actions as have already long had the praise 
of men, and do not perceive that anything man can do may 
be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organ- 
ized in some places or duties, in certain offices or occasions, 
and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a 
catgut, and Eulenstein from a jewsharp, and a nimble- 
fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and 
Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habita- 
tion and company in which he was hidden. What we call 
obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and 
society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall 
presently make as enviable and renowned as any. In our 
estimates, let us take a lesson from kings. The parts of 
hospitality, the connection of families, the impressiveness 
of death, and a thousand other things, royalty makes its own 
estimate of, and a royal mind will. To make habitually 
a new estimate, — that is elevation. 

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with 
hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard 
no good as solid, but that which is in his nature, and which 
must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of 



108 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him 
scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his 
infinite productiveness. 

He may have his own. A man's genius, the quality that 
differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one 
class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the 
rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character 
of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrange- 
ment ; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wher- 
ever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity 
that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those 
booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch 
drift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. 
Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory 
without his being able to say why, remain, because they have 
a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. 
They are symbols of value to him, as they can interpret parts 
of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for 
in the conventional images of books and other minds. What 
attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man 
who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons, as worthy, 
go by it, to whom I give no regard. It is enough that these 
particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of 
character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis 
in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent 
significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. 
They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and 
do not reject them, and cast about for illustration and facts 
more usual in literature. What your heart thinks great is 
great. The souFs emphasis is always right. 

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius, 
the man has the highest right. Everywhere he may take 
what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor can he take anything 
else, though all doors were open, nor can all the force of men 
hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to attempt *to 
keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will 
tell itself. That mood into which a friend can bring us is 
his dominion over us. To the thoughts of that state of mind 
he has a right. All the secrets of that state of mind he 
can compel. This is a law which statesmen use in practice. 
All the terrors of the French Republic, which held Austria 
in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 109 

Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old 
noblesse, with the morals, manners, and name of that interest, 
saying, that it was indispensable to send to the old aris- 
tocracy of Europe men of the same connection, which, in 
fact, constitutes a sort of freemasonry. M. de Narbonne, 
in less than a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of the 
imperial cabinet. 

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. 
Yet a man may come to find that the strongest of defences 
and of ties, — that he has been understood ; and he who has 
received an opinion may come to find it the most incon- 
venient of bonds. 

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, 
his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as 
into any. which he publishes. If you pour water into a vessel 
twisted into coils and angles, it is vain to say, I v/ill pour 
it only into this or that ; it will find its level in all. Men feel 
and act the consequences of your doctrine, without being 
able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of the curve, 
and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure » 
We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence 
the perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of 
remote ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep 
in his book, but time and like-minded men will find them. 
Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he 
conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? 
Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, "They are published 
and not published.^^ 

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, 
however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell 
his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be 
never the wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chemist 
for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature 
ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that 
stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is 
ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw 
them not is like a dream. 

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he 
sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gild- 
ing, exalting soul for all its pride. "Earth fills her lap with 
splendors'' not her own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli, and 
Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as 



no SPIRITUAL LAWS 

good earth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaf- 
fecting ! 

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon 
and the trees; as it is not observed that the keepers of 
Roman galleries, or the valets of painters, have any eleva- 
tion of thought, or that librarians are wiser men than others. 
There are graces in the demeanor of a polished and noble 
person, which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These are 
like the stars whose light has not yet reached us. 

He may say what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel 
of our waking knowledge. The visions of the night bear 
some proportion to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams 
are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We see our evil 
;affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps 
the traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified 
to a giant, so that every gesture of his hand is terrific. '^My 
children, '^ said an old man to his boys scared by a figure in 
the dark entry, — ^^my children, you will never see an3rthing 
worse than yourselves.'' As in dreams, so in the scarcely 
less fluid events of the world, every man sees himself in 
colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, 
compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good to 
his own evil. Every quality of his mind is magnified in 
some one acquaintance, and every emotion of his heart in 
some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts 
five, east, west, north, or south; or, an initial, medial, and 
terminal acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person, 
and avoids another, according to their likeness or unlikeness 
to himself, truly seeking himself in his associates, and more- 
over in his trade, and habits, and gestures, and meats, and 
drinks; and comes at last to be faithfully represented by 
every view you take of his circumstances. 

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire, 
but what we are ? You have observed a skilful man reading 
Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand 
persons. Take the book into your two hands, and read your 
eyes out ; you will never find what I find. If any ingenious 
reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he 
gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were 
imprisoned in the Pelews' tongue. It is with a good book 
as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among 
gentlemen; it is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 111 

Every society protects itself. The company is perfectly safe, 
and he is not one of them, though his body is in the room. 

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, 
which adjust the relation of all persons to each other, by 
the mathematical measure of their havings and beings? 
Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how aristocratic, 
how Roman his mien and manners ! to live with him were 
life indeed, and no purchase is too great; and heaven and 
earth are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; 
but what now avails how high, how aristocratic, how Roman 
his mien and manners, if his heart and aims are in the senate, 
in the tHeatre, and in the billiard-room, and she has no aims, 
no conversation, that can enchant her graceful lord? 

He shall have his own society. W^e can love nothing but 
nature. The most wonderful talents, the most meritorious: 
exertions, really avail very little with us; but nearness or 
likeness of nature, — how beautiful is the ease of its victory t. 
Persons approach us famous for their beauty, for their 
accomplishments, worthy of all wonder for their charms 
and gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to the hour and 
the company, with very imperfect result. To be sure, it 
would be ungrateful in us not to praise them loudly. Then, 
when all is done, a person of related mind, a brother or sister 
by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly and 
intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper veins, that 
we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another having; 
come; we are utterly relieved and refreshed; it is a sort 
of joyful solitude. We foolishly think, in our days of sin, 
that we must court friends by compliance to the customs 
of society, to its dress, its breeding, and its estimates. But 
only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line 
jof my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and 
which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial 
latitude, repeats in its own all my experience. The scholar 
forgets himself, and apes the customs and costumes of the 
man of the world, to deserve the smile of beauty, and follow 
some giddy girl not yet taught by religious passion to know 
the noble woman with all that is serene, oracular, and beauti- 
ful in her soul. Let him be great, and love shall follow him. 
Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the 
affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the 
insane levity of choosing associates by others' eyes. 



112 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all 
acceptation, that a man may have that allowance he takes. 
Take the place and attitude which belong to you, and all 
men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every 
man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero 
or driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly 
accept your own measure of your doing and being, whether 
you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether you 
see your work produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, 
one with the revolution of the stars. 

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may 
teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate 
himself, he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who 
gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching 
until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle 
in which you are ; a transfusion takes place ; he is you, and 
you are he ; then is a teaching ; and by no unfriendly chance 
or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit. But your 
propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the other. 
We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration 
on the Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics^ 
Association, and we do not go thither, because we know that 
these gentlemen will not communicate their own character 
and experience to the company. If we had reason to expect 
such a confidence, we should go through all inconvenience 
and opposition. The sick would be carried in litters. But 
a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, 
a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man. 

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We 
have yet to learn, that the thing uttered in words is not there- 
fore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or 
of oath can give it evidence. The sentence must also contain 
its own apology for being spoken. 

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathe- 
matically measurable by its depth of thought. How much 
water does it draw? If it awakens you to think, if it lift 
you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then 
the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds 
of men ; if the pages instruct you not, they will die like flies 
in the hour. The way to speak and write what shall not go 
out of fashion is, to speak and write sincerely. The argument 
which has not power to reach my own practice, I may well 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 113 

doubt, will fail to reach yours. But take Sidney's maxim, 
''Look in thy heart, and write." He that writes to himself 
writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be 
made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy 
your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from 
his ear, and not from his heart, should know that he has lost 
as much as he seems to have gained, and when the empty 
book has gathered all its praise, and half the people say, 
' What poetry ! what genius ! ' it still needs fuel to make 
fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can 
impart life ; and though we should burst, we can only be 
valued as we make ourselves valuable. There is no luck in 
literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict 
upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the 
hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public 
not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, 
decides upon every man^s title to fame. Only those books 
come down which deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum, and 
morocco, and presentation copies to all the libraries, will 
not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date. 
It must go with all Walpole^s Noble and Royal Authors to 
its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or PoUok may endure for 
a night, but Moses and Homer stand forever. There are 
not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons 
who read and understand Plato : never enough to pay for 
an edition of his works ; yet to every generation these come 
duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought 
them in his hand. "No book,'' said Bentley, "was ever 
written down by any but itself.'' The permanence of all 
books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their 
own specific gra\dty, or the intrinsic importance of their 
contents to the constant mind of man. "Do not trouble 
yourself too much about the light on your statue," said 
Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; "the light of the 
public square will test its value." 

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by 
the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The 
great man knew not that he was great. It took a century 
or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because 
he must ; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew 
out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every- 
thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating 




114 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institu- 
tion. 

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the gen- 
ius of nature ; they show the direction of the stream. But the 
stream is blood ; every drop is alive. Truth has not single 
victories ; all things are its organs, — not only dust and 
stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians 
say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy 
is affirmative, and readily accepts the testimony of negative 
facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine neces- 
sity, every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony. 

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most 
fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the 
intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act, you 
show character ; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. - 
You think, because you have spoken nothing when others 
spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, 
on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, 
on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is 
still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far 
otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no 
oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you 
cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom 
cry, and understanding put forth her voice? 

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dis- 
simulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members 
of the body. Faces never lie, it is said. No man need be 
deceived, who will study the changes of expression. When 
a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as 
clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks 
falsely, the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint. 

I have heard an experienced counsellor say, that he never 
feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe 
in his heart that his client ought to have a verdict. If he 
does not believe it, his unbelief will appear to the jury, 
despite all his protestations, and will become their unbelief. 
This is that law whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, 
sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when 
he made it. That which we do not believe, we cannot 
adequately say, though we may repeat the words never so 
often. It w^s this conviction which Swedenborg expressed, 
when he described a group of persons in the spiritual world 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 115 

endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which they 
did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted 
and folded their lips even to indignation. 

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity 
concerning other people^s estimate of us, and all fear of 
remaining unknown is not less so. If a man know that he 
can do anything, — that he can do it better than any one 
else, — he has a pledge of the acknowledgment of that fact 
by all persons. The world is full of judgment-days, and into 
every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, 
he is gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop 
and run in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well and 
accurately weighed in the course of a few days, and stamped 
with his right number, as if he had undergone a formal trial 
of his strength, speed, and temper. A stranger comes from 
a distant school, with better dress, with trinkets in his pockets, 
with airs and pretensions : an older boy says to himself, 
*It's of no use; we shall find him out to-morrow.' ^What 
has he done?' is the divine question which searches men, 
and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in 
any chair of the world, nor be distinguished for his hour from 
Homer and Washington ; but there need never be any doubt 
concerning the respective ability of human beings. Pre- 
tension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never 
feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an 
Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor Christianized the world, 
nor abolished slavery. 

As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much 
goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. All 
the devils respect virtue. The high, the generous, the self- 
devoted sect will always instruct and command mankind. 
Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity 
fell to the ground, but there is some heart to greet and accept 
it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What 
he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in 
letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing ; boasting, 
nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; 
in our smiles ; in salutations ; and the grasp of hands. His 
sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression. Men know 
not why they do not trust him ; but they do not trust him. 
His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his 
cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the 



116 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

back of the head, and writes fool ! fool ! on the forehead 
of a king. 

If you would not be known to do anything, never do it. 
A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every 
grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, 
but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion, 
a swinish look, ungenerous acts, and the want of due knowl- 
edge, — all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an lachimo, be 
mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed, '*How 
can a man be concealed ! How can a man be concealed !" t 

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold 
the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed 
and unloved. One knows it, — himself, — and is pledged by 
it to sweetness of peace, and to nobleness of aim, which will 
prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating 
of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the 
nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. 
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, 
and with sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM. 

The lesson which these observations convey is. Be, and 
not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated 
nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let 
us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the 
Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great. 

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not 
having visited him, and waste his time and deface your 
own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that the highest 
love has come to see him, in thee, its lowest organ. Or why 
need you torment yourself and friend by secret self-reproaches 
that you have not assisted him or complimented him with 
gifts and salutations heretofore ? Be a gift and a benediction. 
Shine with real light, and not with the borrowed reflection 
of gifts. Common men are apologies for men; they bow 
the head, excuse themselves with prolix reasons, and ac- 
cumulate appearances, because the substance is not. 

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of 
magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is not 
a president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore an in- 
stitution, and do not see that it is founded on a thought 
which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The 
epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice 
of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 117 

the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk ; 
in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says, 
"Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus/^ And all our 
after years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and, according 
to their ability, execute its will. This revisal or correction 
is a constant force, ' which, as a tendency, reaches through 
our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these mo- 
ments, is to make dayhght shine through him, to suffer the 
law to traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that 
on what point soever of his doing your eye falls, it shall report 
truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his house, his 
religious forms, his society, his mirth, his vote, his opposition. 
Now he is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray 
does not traverse ; there are no thorough lights ; but the eye 
of the beholder is puzzled, detecting many unhke tendencies, 
and a Hfe not yet at one. 

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty 
to disparage that man we are, and that form of being assigned 
to us? A good man is contented. I love and honor Epami- 
nondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it 
more just to love the world of this hour, than the world of his 
hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least 
uneasiness by saying, ^He acted, and thou sittest still.' 
I see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still 
to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take 
him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot 
had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all 
modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be busybodies 
and superserviceable ? Action and inaction are alike to the 
true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and one 
for the sleeper of a bridge ; the virtue of the wood is apparent 
in both. 

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here 
certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. 
Shall I not assume the post? Shall T skullc and dodge and 
duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain modesty, and 
imagine my being here impertinent? less pertinent than 
Epaminondas or Homer being there? and that the soul did 
not know its own needs? Besides, without any reasoning 
on the matter, I have no discontent. The good soul nourishes 
me, and unlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to 
me every day. I will not meanly decline the immensity of 



118 SPIRITUAL LAWS 

good, because I have heard that it has come to others in 
another shape. 

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? 
^T is a trick of the senses, — no more. We know that the 
ancestor of every action is a thought. The poor mind does 
not seem to itself to be an3^hing, unless it have an outside 
badge, — some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic 
pra^^er-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great donation, 
or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action 
to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun 
and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act. 

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. 
All action is of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits of 
being inflated with the celestial air until it ecHpses the sun 
and moon. Let us seek one peace by fideUty. Let me heed 
my duties. Why need I go gadding into the scenes and 
philosophy of Greek and Itahan history, before I have 
justified nwself to my benefactors? How dare I read 
Washington's campaigns, when I have not answered the letters 
of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to 
much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our 
work to gaze after our neighbors. It is peeping. Byron 
says of Jack Bunting, — 

^' He knew not what to say, and so he swore." 

I may say it of our preposterous use of books, — He knew 
not what to do, and so he read. I can think of nothing to 
fill my time with, and I find the Life of Brant. It is a very 
extravagant compliment to pay to Brant, or to General 
Schuyler, or to General Washingt-on. My time should be 
as good as their time, — my facts, my net of relations, as 
good as theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work 
so well that other idlers, if they choose, may compare my 
texture with the texture of these and find it identical with the 
best. 

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, 
this under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the 
fact of an identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, 
and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the 
good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. The poet 
uses the names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of 
Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of the 



SPIRITUAL LAWS 119 

Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not, therefore, 
defer to the nature of these accidental men, of these stock 
heroes. If the poet write a true drama, then he is Caesar, 
and not the player of Caesar; then the selfsame strain of 
thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift 
mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing, 
dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift 
all that is reckoned solid and precious in the world, — palaces^ 
gardens, money, navies, kingdoms, — marking its own 
incomparable worth by the slight it casts on these gauds of 
men, — these all are his, and by the power of these he rouses 
the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names 
and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in 
some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly 
or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers and scour 
floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, 
but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and 
beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and 
all people will get mops and brooms ; until, lo ! suddenly 
the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form, and 
done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head 
of all living nature. 

We are the photometers, we the irritable gold-leaf and 
tin-foil that measure the accumulations of the subtle element. 
We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every 
one of its milHon disguises. 



1 



FRIENDSHIP 

A RUDDY drop of manly blood 

The surging sea outweighs, 

The world uncertain comes and goes, 

The lover rooted stays. 

I fancied he was fled, 

And, after many a year. 

Glowed unexhausted kindliness 

Like daily sunrise there. 

My careful heart was free again, — 

O friend, my bosom said, 

Through thee alone the sky is arched, 

Through thee the rose is red, 

All things through thee take nobler form, 

And look beyond the earth, 

The mill-round of our fate appears 

A sun-path in thy worth. 

Me too thy nobleness has taught 

To master mj^ despair ; 

The fountains of my hidden life 

Are through thy friendship fair. 

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. 
Maugre all the selfishness that chills like eastwinds the world, 
the whole human family is bathed with an element of love 
like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, 
whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who 
honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in 
church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be 
with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. 
The heart knoweth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is 
a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common 
speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which 
are felt towards others are likened to the material effects 

120 



FRIENDSHIP 121 

of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more 
cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the 
highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of 
good- will, they make the sweetness of life. 

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our 
affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years 
of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or 
happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to 
a friend, — and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest 
them.selves, on every h^nd, with chosen words. See, in any 
house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation 
which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended 
stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness be- 
twixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. 
His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would 
welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their 
places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must 
get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only 
the good report is told by others, only the good and new is 
heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we 
wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we 
should stand related in conversation and action with such 
a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts 
conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. 
We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb 
devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can 
continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, 
drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they 
who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel 
a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as 
the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, 
his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has 
heard the first, the last, and best he will ever hear from us. 
He is no stranger now. Vulgarity ignorance, misappre- 
hension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he 
may find the order, the dress, and the dinner, — but the 
throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, 
no more. 

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make 
a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just 
and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How 
beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps 



122 FRIENDSHIP 

and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we 
indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there 
is no winter, and no night ; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish, 
— all duties even ; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but 
the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be 
assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its 
friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a 
thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my 
friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the beauti- 
ful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts ? I chide 
society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful 
as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as 
from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who 
understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time. 
Nor is Nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, 
and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of 
relations ; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate 
themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our 
own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a 
traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. 
The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the 
divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather 
not I but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels 
the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, 
circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes 
many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who 
carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and 
enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new 
poetry of the first Bard, — poetry without stop, — h^^mn, 
ode, and epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses 
chanting still. Will these, too, separate themselves from 
me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; 
for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple 
affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same 
affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as 
these men and women, wherever I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. 
It is almost dangerous to me to ^^ crush the sweet poison of 
misused wine'' of the affections. A new person is to me 
a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had 
fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious 



FRIENDSHIP 123 

hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. 
Thought is not born of it ; my action is very little modified. 
I must feel pride in my friend^s accomplishments as if they 
were mine, — and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly 
when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of 
his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of 
our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, 
his nature finer, bis temptations less. Everything that is 
his, — his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments, 
— fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and 
larger from his mouth. 

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without 
their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like 
the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The 
lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not 
verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of 
friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and 
unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues 
in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to 
which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strict- 
ness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In 
strict science all persons underlie the same condition of an 
infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining 
for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? 
Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall 
not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence 
is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs 
finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is 
not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons 
we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production 
of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it 
should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who 
stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of 
himself. He is conscious of a universal success, even though 
bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, 
no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for him. I 
cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on 
your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount 
to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, 
moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts 
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that 
for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at 



124 FRIENDSHIP 

last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, friend, that 
the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also 
in its pied and painted immensity, — thee, also, compared 
with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as 
Truth is, as Justice is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture 
and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already 
thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not the soul puts 
forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by 
the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The 
law of nature is alternation forevermore. Each electrical 
state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself 
with friends, that it may enter into a grander self -acquaint- 
ance or solitude ; and it goes alone for a season, that it may 
exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself 
along the whole history of our personal relations. The 
instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, 
and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. 
Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, 
and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write 
a letter like this to each new candidate for his love. 

Dear Friend : — 

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match 
my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles 
in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise ; 
my moods are quite attainable ; and I respect thy genius ; 
it is to me as yet unfathomed ; yet dare I not presume in thee 
a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious 
torment. Thine ever, or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, 
and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to 
weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to 
short and poor conclusions, because we have made them 
a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of 
the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and 
eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. 
But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck 
a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the 
whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters 
must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an 
adulterated passion which would appropriate him to our- 



i 



FRIENDSHIP 125 



selves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antag- 
onisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and trans- 
late all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend 
to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what 
is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of 
the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. 
What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of 
the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been com- 
passed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently 
by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by 
epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of 
friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play as true, 
and both parties are relieved by solitude. 

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no differ- 
ence how many friends I have, and what content I can find 
in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not 
equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy 
I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should 
hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum. 

''The valiant warrior famoused for fight, 
After a hundred victories, once foiled, 
Is from the book of honor razed quite, 
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled." 

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness 
and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization 
is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost, 
if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe 
enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit 
which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in 
duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. 
The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price 
of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for 
levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this 
childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth ; let 
us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth 
of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of 
his foundations. 

. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and 
I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, 
to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind 
of absolute, and which even leaves the language of l<»ve 



IIJ FRIENDSHIP 

suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing 
is so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest 
courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or 
frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after 
so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, 
or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the 
solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation 
of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet 
sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance 
with my brother^s soul, is the nut itself, whereof all nature 
and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house 
that shelters a friend ! It might well be built, like a festal 
bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if 
he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law ! 
He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes 
up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first-r 
born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself 
for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the hsts, and 
he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution 
to preserve the deUcacy of his beauty from the wear and tear 
of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, 
but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, 
and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that 
go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that 
I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either 
should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person 
with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud » 
I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, 
that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimula- 
tion, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, 
and may deal with him with the simphcity and wholeness 
with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity 
is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to 
the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as 
having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man 
alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hy- 
pocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our 
fellow-nian by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by 
affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred 
folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain religious frenzy, 
cast off this drapery, and, omitting all comphment and com- 



FRIENDSHIP 127 

monplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he en- 
countered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first 
he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persist- 
ing, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this 
course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man 
of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man 
would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him 
off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every 
man was constrained by so much sincerity to the Uke plain- 
dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol 
of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us 
society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. 
To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a 
fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost 
every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be 
humored ; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of 
rehgion or philanthropy^ in his head, that is not to be ques- 
tioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But 
a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but 
me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring 
any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort 
of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing 
in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence 
to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its 
height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form ; 
so that a friend may w^ell be reckoned the masterpiece of 
nature. 

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are 
holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by 
fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by 
every circumstance, and badge and trifle, but we can scarce 
believe that so much character can subsist in another as to 
draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, 
that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes 
dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very 
little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. 
And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. 
My author says: ^'I offer myself faintly and bluntly to 
those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him 
to whom I am the most devoted. '' I wish that friendship 
should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must 
plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. 



n 



128 FRIENDSHIP 

I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. 
We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. 
It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans ; it is good neigh- 
borhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at 
the funeral ; and quite loses sight of the dehcacies and nobility 
of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under 
this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot 
forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not 
substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, 
punctuaUty, fidelity, and pity. I hate the prostitution of 
the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. 
I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-pedlers, 
to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days 
of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and 
dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a 
commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; 
more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for 
aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of 
life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, 
and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, 
shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company 
with the sallies of the wit and the trances of rehgion. We are 
to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's 
life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It 
should never fall into something usual and settled, but should 
be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what 
was drudgery. 

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and 
costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and 
withal so circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet 
says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired), 
that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot 
subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned 
in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. 
I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have 
never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my 
imagination more with a circle of godUke men and women 
variously related to each other, and between whom subsists 
a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremp- 
tory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation 
of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix 
as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheer- 



FRIENDSHIP 129 

ing discourse at several times with two several men, but let 
all three of you come together, and you shall not have one 
new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, 
but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most 
sincere and searching sort. In good company, there is 
never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes 
place when you leave them alone. In good company, the 
individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly 
coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. 
No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother 
to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite 
otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the 
common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his 
own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, 
destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires 
an absolute running of two souls into one. 

No two men but, being left alone with each other, enter 
into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines 
which two shall converse. Unrelated men give Uttle joy 
to each other ; will never suspect the latent powers of each. 
We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if 
it were a permanent propert.y in some individuals. Conver- 
sation is an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is 
reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all 
that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his 
silence with as much reason as they would blame the in- 
significance of a dial in the shade. In the sim it will mark 
the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will 
regain his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and 
unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and 
of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of 
the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by 
a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked 
by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an 
instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, 
is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a 
manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a 
mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your 
friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship 
demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires 
great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before 



130 FRIENDSHIP 

there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, 
formidable natures mutually beheld, mutually feared, before 
yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these 
disparities unites them. 

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who 
is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; 
' who is not swiit to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let 
him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its 
ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. 
Friendship demands a rehgious treatment. We talk of 
choosing our friends, but friends are self -elected. Reverence 
is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of 
course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot 
honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. 
Stand aside ; give these merits room ; let them mount and 
expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of 
his thought ? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a 
thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest 
ground. Leave it to the girls and boys to regard a friend as 
property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, 
instead of the noblest benefit. 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. 
Wh}^ should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by 
intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations 
with 3^our friend? Why go to his house, and know his 
mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him 
at your o\^ti? Are these things material to our covenant? 
Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. 
A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, 
but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and 
neighborl}^ conveniences from cheaper companions. Should 
not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, 
and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is 
profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps 
on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that di\ddes 
the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. 
That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien 
and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather 
fortif}^ and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him 
not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard 
him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort 
of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not 



FRIENDSHIP 131 

a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. 
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be 
seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, 
and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. 
It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, 
and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm 
lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, 
and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all 
the annals of heroism have yet made good. 

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to 
prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. 
We must be our own before we can be another's. There 
is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin 
proverb : you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. 
Crimen quos inquinat, cequat. To those whom we admire 
and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self- 
possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. 
There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never 
mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the 
whole world. 

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what 
grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may 
hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who 
set you to cast about what you should say to the select 
souls, or how to say anything to such? No matter how 
ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are 
innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to 
say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall 
speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting over- 
powers you, until day and night avail themselves of your 
lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way 
to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer 
a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only 
flees the faster from you, and you shall never catch a true 
' glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel 
us; why should we intrude? Late, — very late, — we 
perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no con- 
suetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish 
us in such relations with them as we desire, — but solely 
the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them ; 
then shall we meet as water with water ; and if we should 
not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are al- 



132 FRIENDSHIP 



H 



ready they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection 
of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have 
sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they 
would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course 
the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk 
alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams 
and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful 
heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, 
souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love 
us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves 
that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders, and of 
shame is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, 
we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be ad- 
monished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of 
friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. 
Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances 
which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though 
you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate 
yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false re- 
lations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, — 
those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature 
at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres 
and shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, 
asif so we could lose any genuine love. TVTiatever correction 
of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be 
sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some 
joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, 
the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have 
all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we 
read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out 
and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are 
such as we ; the Europe an old faded garment of dead persons ; 
the books their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us 
give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest 
friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ^Who are you? 
Unhand me : I will be dependent no more.' Ah ! seest thou 
not, brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a 
higher platform, and only be more each other's, because 
we are more our own ? A friend is Janus-faced : he looks to 
the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing 



FRIENDSHIP 133 

hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of 
a greater friend, 

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I 
would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use 
them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit 
or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to 
speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so 
great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, 
presentments hover before me in the firmament. I ought 
then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize 
them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may 
lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only 
a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, 
I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, 
lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain house- 
hold joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, 
or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with 
you ; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing 
of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid 
moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign 
objects ; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, 
and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, 
perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions, not with 
yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any 
more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my 
friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from 
them, not what they have, but what they are. They shall 
give me that which properly the^^ cannot give, but which 
emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any 
relations less subtle and pure. We will meet as though 
we met not, and part as though we parted not. 

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to 
carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due cor- 
respondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with 
regrets that the receiver is not capacious ? It never troubles 
the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrate- 
ful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. 
Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. 
If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art 
enlarged by thy own shining, and, no longer a mate for frogs 
and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. 
It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great 



134 FRIENDSHIP 

will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love 
transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on 
the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, 
it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its 
independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be 
said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence 
of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. 
It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its 
object as a god, that it may deify both. 



HEROISM 

. "Paradise is under the shadow of swords." 

— Mahomet. 

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons ; 
Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons, 
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread 
Lightning-knotted round his head ; 
The hero is not fed on sweets, 
Daily his own heart he eats ; 
Chambers of the great are jails. 
And head-winds right for royal sails. 

In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays 
of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of 
gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the 
society of their age, as color is in our American population. 
When any Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio enters, though he be a 
stranger, the duke or governor exclaims. This is a gentleman, 

— and proffers civilities without end ; but all the rest are 
slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal 
advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of 
character and dialogue, — as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad 
Lover, the Double Marriage, — wherein the speaker is so 
earnest and cordial, and on such deep grounds of character, 
that the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident in the 
plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts, take 
the following. The Roman Martins has conquered Athens, 

— all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the Duke of 
Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter in- 
flames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband ; but Soph- 

135 



136 HEROISM . i 

ocles will not ask his life, although assured that a word will 
save him, and the execution of both proceeds. 

'^ Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell. 

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, 
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown, . _ 

My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste. 

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight ; 
Let not soft nature so transformed be, 
And lose her gentler sexed humanity. 
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 't is well ; 
Never one object underneath the sun 
Will I behold before my Sophocles : 
Farewell ; now teach the Romans how to die. 

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die? 

Soph. Thou dost not, Martins, 
And, therefore, not what 't is to live ; to die 
Is to begin to live. It is to end 
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence 
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave 
Deceitful knaves for the society 
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part 
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, 
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do. 

Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus? 

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent 
To them I ever loved best? Now I'll kneel, 
But with my back toward thee ; 't is the last duty 
This trunk can do the gods. 

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, 
Or Martins' heart wiU leap out at his mouth : 
This is a man, a woman ! Kiss thy lord, 
And live with all the freedom you were wont. 
O love ! thou doubly hast afflicted me 
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart, 
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, 
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety. 

Val. What ails my brother? 

Soph. Martins, O Martins, 
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me. 

Dor. O star of Rome ! what gratitude can speak 
Fit words to follow such a deed as this ! 

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, 
With his disdain of fortune and of death, 
Captived himseK, has captivated me, 
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here, 
His soul hath subjugated Martins' soul. 



HEROISM 137 

By Romulus, he is all soul, I think ; 
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved ; 
Then we have vanquished nothing ; he is free, 
And Martins walks now in captivity." 

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, 
or oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which 
goes to the same tune. We have a great many flutes and 
flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet, Words- 
worth's ^'Laodamia,'' and the ode of ^'Dion,'' and some son- 
nets, have a certain noble music ; and Scott will sometimes 
draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale, given by 
Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste 
for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no 
heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and 
historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a 
song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies, there is an ac- 
count of the battle of Lutzen, which deserves to be read. 
And Simon Ockley's History of the Saracens recounts the 
prodigies of individual valor with admiration, all the more 
evident on the part of the narrator, that he seems to thuik 
that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some proper 
protestations of abhorrence. But, if we explore the literature 
of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its 
Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the 
Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think 
we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient 
writers. Each of his ^'Lives'' is a rebuke to the despondency 
and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild 
courage, a Stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood, shines 
in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame. 

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books 
of political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival 
only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of 
prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. The viola- 
tions of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our con- 
temporaries are punished in us also. The disease and deform- 
ity around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual,, 
and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed 
such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head 
back to his heels ; hydrophobia, that makes him bark at his 
wife and babes; insanity, that makes him eat grass; war, 
plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, 



138 HEROISM 

which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its out- 
let by human suffering. Unhappily, no man exists who has 
not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder 
in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expia- 
tion. 

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the 
man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state 
of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being 
require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, 
but warned, self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading 
the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, 
and, ^\ith perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by 
the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his be- 
havior. 

Towards all this external evil, the man within the breast 
assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his abiUty to cope 
single-handed wdth the infinite army of enemies. To this 
military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism. 
Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which 
makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self -trust which 
sHghts the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy 
and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a 
mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, 
but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his 
ovm. music, ahke in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth 
of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philo- 
sophical in heroism ; there is somewhat not holy in it ; it seems 
not to know that other souls are of one texture with it ; it 
has pride ; it is the extreme of indi^ddual nature. Neverthe- 
less, we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat in 
great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. 
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right ; 
and although a different breeding, different rehgion, and 
greater intellectual acti\dty would have modified or even re- 
versed the particular action, yet for the hero that thing he 
does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of 
philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled 
man, that he finds a quaht}^ in him that is negligent of ex- 
pense, of health, of hfe, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and 
knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual 
and all possible antagonists. 

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, 



HEROISM 139 

and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and 
good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an in- 
dividuaPs character. Now to no other man can its wisdom 
appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to 
see a Httle farther on his own proper path than any one else. 
Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until 
after some little time be past : then they see it to be in unison 
with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean 
contrary to a sensual prosperity ; for every heroic act measures 
itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its 
own success at last, and then the prudent also extol. 

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the 
soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of 
falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be 
inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, 
generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, 
and scornful of being scorned. It persists ; it is of an un- 
daunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. 
Its jest is the httleness of common life. That false prudence 
which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment 
of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its 
body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums and cat's- 
cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and cus- 
tard, which rack the wit of all society? What joys has kind 
nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be 
no interval between greatness and meanness. When the 
spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the 
little man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it so 
headlong and believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging 
his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for sweet 
food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, 
made happy with a httle gossip or a little praise, that the great 
soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. ^'In- 
deed, these humble considerations make me out of love with 
greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many 
pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that 
were the peach-colored ones ; or to bear the inventory of thy 
shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use !'' 

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the 
inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon 
narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display : the soul 
of a better quality thrusts back the unseasonable economy into 



140 HEROISM 

the vaults of life, and says, I mil obey the God, and the sacri- 
fice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian 
geographer, describes a heroic extreme in the hospitahty of 
Sogd, in Bukharia. ^^When I was in Sogd, I saw a great 
building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed 
back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and 
was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for 
a hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any 
hour, and in whatever number ; the master has amply pro- 
vided for the reception of the men and their animals, and is 
never happier than when they tarry for some time. Nothing 
of the kind have I seen in any other country. '^ The mag- 
nanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, 
or shelter, to the stranger, — so it be done for love, and not 
for ostentation, — do, as it were, put God under obligation 
to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe. 
In some way the time they seem to lose is redeemed, and the 
pains they seem to take remunerate themselves. These men 
fan the flame of human love, and raise the standard of civil 
virtue among mankind. But hospitahty must be for service, 
and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul 
rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table 
and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its 
own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair 
water than belong to city feasts. 

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish 
to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it 
for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth 
his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating 
or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, 
or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he 
dresses ; but without railing or precision, his living is natural 
and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, 
and said of wine, ^*It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should 
be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was 
made before it." Better still is the temperance of King David 
who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which 
three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril 
of their lives. 

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword, after 
the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides, "0 Vir- 
tue ! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at 



HEROISM 141 

last but a shade/' I doubt not the hero is slandered by this; 
report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its noble- 
ness. It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The 
essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. 
Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can 
very well abide its loss. 

But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class,, 
is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height 
to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to- 
dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, suc- 
cess, and life at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their 
enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their 
own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, 
refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justi- 
fication, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands^ 
but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates^s con- 
demnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the 
Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas Morels playful- 
ness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont 
and Fletcher's ^'Sea Voyage/' Juletta tells the stout captain 
and his company, — 

^^ Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye. 
Master. Very likely, 

'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.'^ 

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and. 
glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to 
take anything seriously ; all must be as gay as the song of a 
canary, though it were the building of citios, or the eradica- 
tion of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cum- 
bered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put 
all the history and customs of this world behind them, and 
play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of 
the world ; and such would appear, could we see the human 
race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together ; 
though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately 
and solemn garb of works and influences. 

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a 
romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under 
his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact 
to our purpose. All these great and transcendent properties 
are ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the 



142 HEROISM 



same ^ 



Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same 
sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest in our small 
houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us 
of our superstitious associations with places and times, with 
number and size . Why should these words , Athenian, Roman, m 
Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, fll 
there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geog- 
raphy of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and 
Eoston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names 
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are ; and, 
if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is 
best. See to it, only, that thyself is here ; — and art and 
nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, 
shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. 
Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to 
need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies 
very well where he is. The Jerseys were honest ground enough 
for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet of 
Milton. A great man makes his climate genial in the imagi- 
nation of men, and its air the beloved element of all delicate 
spirits. That country is the fairest, which is inhabited by 
the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination 
in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Ba- 
yard, Sidney, Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our 
life is, that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with 
more than regal or national splendor, and act on principles 
that should interest man and nature in the length of our days. 
We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, 
who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was 
not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when 
we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion, we admire 
their superiority, they seem to throw contempt on our entire 
polity and social state ; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, 
who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active 
p^rofession, and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common 
size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, 
which always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough 
world had its revenge the moment they put their horses of 
the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no example and 
no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The 
lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true ; and a 
better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their 



HEROISM 143 

belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical 
woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or D& Stael, 
or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, 
do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis, none 
can, — certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and 
unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest 
nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden with erect soul 
walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of each new expe- 
rience, search in turn all the objects that solicit her eye, that 
she may learn the power and the charm of her new-born being, 
which is the kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of space. 
The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided and proud 
choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty, 
inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. 
The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail 
to a fear ! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. 
Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and re- 
fined by the vision. 

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men 
have wandering impulses, fits, and starts of generosity. But 
when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not 
weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic 
cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. Yet 
we have the weakness to expect the sympathy of people in 
those actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy, 
and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve your 
brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back 
your words, when you find that prudent people do not com- 
mend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate your- 
self if you have done something strange and extravagant, and 
broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high coun- 
sel that I once heard given to a young person, — '^ Always 
do what you are afraid to do.'^ A simple, manly character 
need never make an apology, but should regard its past action 
with the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that the 
event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion 
from the battle. 

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find 
consolation in the thought, — that is a part of my constitu- 
tion, part of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. 
Has nature covenanted with me that I should never appear 
to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure ? Let us be 



144 HEROISM 

generous of our dignity, as well as of our money. Greatness 
once and forever has done with opinion. We tell our char- 
ities, not because we w4sh to be praised for them, not because 
we think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is 
a capital blunder ; as you discover, when another man recites 
his charities. 

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with 
some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, 
seem to be an asceticism which common good nature would 
appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that 
they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering 
men. And not only need we breathe and exercise the soul 
by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, 
of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with 
8. bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade 
men, and to familiarize himself with disgusting forms of dis- 
ease, with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent 
death. 

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day 
never shines in which this element may not work. The cir- 
cumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat better 
in this country, and at this hour, than perhaps ever before. 
More freedom exists for culture. It will not now run against 
an axe at the first step out of the beaten track of opinion. But 
whoso is heroic will always find crises to try this edge. Human 
Tirtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial 
of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that 
the brave Love joy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, 
for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it 
ivas better not to five. 

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, 
b)ut after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too 
much association, let him go home much, and stabhsh himseK 
in those courses he approves. The unremitting retention of 
simple and high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening 
the character to that temper which will work with honor, 
if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever out- 
rages have happened to men may befall a man again; and 
very easily in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay 
of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gib- 
bet, the youth may freely bring home to his mind, and with 
what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he can 



HEROISM 145 

fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may 
please the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his 
neighbors to pronounce his opinions incendiary. 

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most sus- 
ceptible heart to see how quick a bound nature has set to the 
utmost infliction of malice. We rapidly approach a brink 
over which no enemy can follow us. 

"Let them rave: 
Thou art quiet in thy grave/' 

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour 
when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those 
who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavor ? Who 
that sees the meanness of our politics, but inlj'^ congratulates 
Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, 
and forever safe ; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope 
of humanity not yet subjugated in him ? Who does not some- 
times envy the good and brave, who are no more to suffer 
from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious 
complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with 
finite nature ? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner 
than be treacherous has already made death impossible, 
and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps of abso- 
lute and inextinguishable being. 



THE OVER-SOUL 

*'But souls that of his own good hfe partake, 
He loves as his own seK ; dear as his eye 
They are to Himj Hell never them forsake : 
When they shalPaie, then God himself shall die : 
They Hve, they Hve in blest eternity." 

— Henry More. 

Space is ample, east and west, 
But two cannot go abreast. 
Cannot travel in it two : 
Yonder masterful cuckoo 
Crowds every egg out of the nest. 
Quick or dead, except its own ; 
A spell is laid on sod and stone, 
Night and Dslj were tampered with, 
Every quality and pith 
Surcharged and sultry with a power 
That works its will on age and hour. 

There is a difference between one and another hour of life, 
in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in 
moments ; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those 
brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to 
them than all other experiences. For this reason, the ar- 
gument which is alwaj^s forthcoming to silence those who 
conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to 
experience, is forever invalid and vain. We give up the past 
to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. 
We grant that human life is mean ; but how did we find out 
that it was mean ? Wliat is the ground of this uneasiness of 
ours; of this old discontent? WTiat is the universal sense 
of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the 
soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the 
natural history of man has never been written, but he is always 

146 



THE OVER-SOUL 147 

leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, 
and books of metaphysics worthless ? The philosophy of six 
thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines 
of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, 
in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man 
is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending 
into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator 
has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk 
the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to 
acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call 
mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that 
flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a sea- 
son its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner ; not a 
cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water ; that 
I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of recep- 
tion, but from some alien energy the visions come. 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, 
and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great 
nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of 
the atmosphere ; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which 
every man's particular being is contained and made one with 
all other ; that common heart, of which all sincere conversa- 
tion is the worship, to which all right action is submission ; 
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, 
and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak 
from his character, and not from his tongue, and which ever- 
more tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become 
wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in suc- 
cession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within 
man is the soul of the whole ; the wise silence ; the universal 
beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related ; 
the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and 
whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-suffic- 
ing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the 
thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the ob- 
ject, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the 
moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these 
are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that 
Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling 
back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of 
prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it 



148 THE OVER-SOUL 

saith. Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must 
sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on 
their o^ti part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not 
carry its august sense ; they fall short and cold. Only itself 
can inspire whom it will, and behold ! their speech shall be 
l}Tical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. 
Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, 
to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints 
I have collected of the transcendent simpUcity and energy of 
the Highest Law. 

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, 
in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instruc- 
tions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, 
— the droll disguises only magnif>dng and enhancing a real 
element, and forcing it on our distinct notice, — we shall 
catch many hints that Tvill broaden and lighten into knowledge 
of the secret of- nature. All goes to show that the soul in man 
is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs ; is 
not a function Hke the power of memory, of calculation, of 
comparison, but uses these as hands and feet ; is not a faculty, 
but a hght ; is not the intellect or the wi]l, but the master of 
the intellect and the ^411; is the background of our being, 
in which they He, — an immensity not possessed and that 
cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light 
shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we 
are nothing, but the Hght is aU. A man is the fagade of a tem- 
ple wherein all Tvdsdom and all good abide. What we com- 
monly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, 
does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents 
himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ 
he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make 
our knees bend. When it breathes through his inteUect, it 
is genius ; when it breathes through his mU, it is virtue ; when 
it flows through his affection, it is love. And the bHndness 
of the intellect begins, when it would be something of itself. 
The weakness of the wi]l begins, when the indi\ddual would 
be something of himself. AU reform aims, in some one par- 
ticular, to let the soul havte its way through us ; iq other words, 
to engage us to obey. 

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. 
Language cannot paint it Tvnth his colors. It is too subtile. 
It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades 



THE OVER-SOUL 149 

and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man, 
A wise old proverb says, ^^God comes to see us without beir^ ; 
that is, as there is no screen or ceihng between our heads and 
the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where 
man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The 
walls are taken away. We He open on one side to the deeps 
of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see 
and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man 
ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the mo- 
ment when our interests tempt us to wound them. j 

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made 
known by its independency of those limitations which cir- 
cumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all 
things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In 
Hke manner it aboHshes time and space. The influence of 
the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that 
degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look 
real and insurmountable ; and to speak with levity of these 
limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and 
space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The 
spirit sports with time, — 

'^Can crowd eternity into an hour, 
Or stretch an hour to eternity.'' 

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and 
age than that which is measured from the year of our natural 
birth. Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. 
Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. 
Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling 
that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least 
activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from 
the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain 
of poetry, or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed ; or 
produce a volume of Plato, or Shakspeare, or remind us of 
their names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. 
See how the deep, divine thought reduces centuries, and mil- 
lenniums, and makes itself present through all ages. Is the 
teaching of Christ less effective now than it was when first 
his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and person 
in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so, always, 
the souFs scale is one ; the scale of the senses and the under- 
standing is another. Before the revelations of the soul, Time, 



150 THE OVER-SOUL 

Space, and Nature shrink away. In common speech, we refer 
all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sun- 
•dired stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that the 
Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, 
that a day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, 
and the like, when we mean, that, in the nature of things, 
one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and 
the other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things 
we now esteem fixed, shall, one by one, detach themselves, 
like ripe fruit, from our experience and fall. The wind shall 
blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures, 
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, 
or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the 
world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world 
before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, 
nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul 
knows only the soul ; the web of events is the flowing robe 
in which she is clothed. 

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its 
progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made 
by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight 
line ; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be repre- 
sented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from 
the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain 
total character, that does not advance the elect individual 
first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each 
the pain of discovered inferiority, but by every throe of 
growth the man expands there where he works, passing, at 
each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each 
divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible 
and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and ex- 
pires its air. It converses with truths that have always been 
spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sym- 
pathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house. 

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple 
rise as by specific levity, not into a particular virtue, but into 
the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which ii 
contains them all. The soul requires purity, but purity is •] 
not it ; requires justice, but justice is not that ; requires benef- 
icence, but is somewhat better; so that there is a kind of 
descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of jj 
moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the well- i 



1 



THE OVER-SOUL 151 

born child, all the virtues are natural, and not painfully ac- 
quired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly 
virtuous. 

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, 
which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humil- 
ity, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a plat- 
form that commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, 
action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude 
already anticipates those special powers which men prize so 
highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for 
quite nothing with his enamored maiden, however little she 
may possess of related faculty ; and the heart which abandons 
itself to the Supreme Mind fuids itself related to all its works, 
and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and 
powers. In ascending to this primary and aboriginal senti- 
ment, we have come from our remote station on the circum- 
ference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as 
in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, 
which is but a slow effect. 

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the 
spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society ; 
with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or 
express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I 
live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common 
nature ; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw 
me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions 
we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; 
thence come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities, 
and war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching 
of the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood 
and youth see all the world in them. But the larger expe- 
rience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through 
them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the im- 
personal. In all conversation between two persons, tacit 
reference is made, as to a third party, to a common na- 
ture. That third party or common nature is not social ; it 
is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate 
is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company 
become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in 
all bosoms, — that all have a spiritual property in what 
was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than 
they were. It arches over them like a temple, this unity of 



152 THE 0\^R-SOUL 

thought, in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power 
and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All 
are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. There 
is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the 
greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary educa- 
tion often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, 
and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think 
much less of property in truth. They accept it thankfully 
€yeryT\^here, and do not label or stamp it with any man's 
name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. 
The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly 
of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree dis- 
qualifies them to think truly. We owe many valuable ob- 
servations to people who are not very acute or profound, and 
w^ho sa}^ the thing without effort, which we want and have 
long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener 
in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said 
in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they 
unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better 
than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know 
at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same 
truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neigh- 
bors, that somewhat higher in each overlooks this by-play, 
and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us. 

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service 
to the world, for which they forsake their native nobleness, 
they resemble those Arabian sheiks, who dwell in mean houses, 
and affect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the 
Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their in- 
terior and guarded retirements. 

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. 
It is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with 
my child, my Latin and Greek, m}^ accomplishm.ents and my 
money, stead me nothing ; but as much soul as I have avails. 
If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and 
leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my 
superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act 
for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of 
his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves 
with me. 

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know 
truth when we see it, let sceptic and scoffer say what they 



THE OVER-SOUL 153 

choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what 
they do not wish to hear, ^How do you know it is truth, and 
not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, 
from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are 
awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, 
which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's per- 
ception^ — ^^ It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able 
to confirm whatever he pleases ; but to be able to discern that 
what is true is true, and that what is false is false, this is 
the mark and character of intelligence." In the book I read 
the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image 
of the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, 
the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and 
lops it away. We are wiser than we know. If we will not 
interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how 
the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and 
ever3^hing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and 
all persons stands behind us, and casts his dread omniscience 
through us over things. 

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular pas- 
sages of the individual's experience, it also reveals truth. And 
here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, 
and to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that advent. 
For the soul's communication of truth is the highest event 
in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself, 
but it givies itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom 
it enlightens ; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it 
takes him to itself. 

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its mani- 
festations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These 
are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For 
this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our 
mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing 
surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this 
central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. 
A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, 
or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of 
the heart of nature. In these commimications, the power 
to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight pro- 
ceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a 
joyful perception. Every moment when the individual feels 
himseK invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity of our 



154 THE OVER-SOUL 

constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends the individuaPs 
consciousness of that Divine presence. The character and 
duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the in- 
dividual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspira- 
tion, — which is its rarer appearance, — to the faintest glow 
of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our house- 
hold fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes 
society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always 
attended the opening of the rehgious sense in men, as if they 
had been '^ blasted with excess of light." The trances of 
Socrates, the ''union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, 
the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convul- 
sions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of 
Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these 
remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable in- 
stances in common Hfe, been exhibited in less striking manner. 
Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to en- 
thusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the 
opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of 
the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic 
churches ; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms 
of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual 
soul always mingles with the universal soul. 

The nature of these revelations is the same ; they are per- 
ceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the souFs 
own questions. They do not answer the questions which the 
understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but 
by the thing itself that is inquired after. 

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular 
notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of fortunes. In 
past oracles of the soul, the understanding seeks to find answers 
to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how 
long men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall 
be their company, adding names, and dates, and places. But 
we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. 
An answer in words is delusive ; it is really no answer to the 
questions you ask. Do not require a description of the coun- 
tries towards which you sail. The description does not des- 
cribe them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there, and know 
them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the immor- 
tality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of 
the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has 



THE OVER-SOUL 155 

left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a mo- 
ment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, 
justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutable- 
ness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral 
sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the 
manifestations of these, never made the separation of the 
idea of duration from the essence of these attributes, nor 
uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It 
was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral ele- 
ments, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, 
and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of 
the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. 
In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humiUty, there is. 
no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this 
question, or condescends to these evidences. For the soul 
is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot 
wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which 
would be finite. 

These questions which we lust to ask about the future .are 
a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer 
in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in 
an arbitrary ^^ decree of God,^' but in the nature of man, that 
a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow ; for the soul will 
not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. 
By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children 
of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an 
answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low 
curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into 
the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all un- 
awares the advancing soul has built and forged for itseK a new 
condition, and the question and the answer are one. ^ 

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns 
until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an 
ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit 
each is of. Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of 
the character of the several individuals in his circle of friends ? 
No man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him.. 
In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. 
In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic signs; 
had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one 
who had an interest in his own character. We know each 
other very well, — which of us has been just to himseK, and 



156 THE OVER-SOUL 

whether that which we teach or behold is only an aspiration, 
or is our honest effort also. 

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft 
:in our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of society 

— its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels — is one 
wide, judicial investigation of character. In full court, or in 
small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and ac- 
cused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their 
will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is 
read. But who judges? and what? Not our understand- 
ing. We do not read them by learning or craft. No ; the 
wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not 
judge them ; he lets them judge themselves, and merely reads 
;and records their own verdict. 

By virtue of tliis inevitable nature, private will is over- 
powered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your 
genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which 
we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. 
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never 
left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues 
w^hich we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over 
our head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the 
tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor 
company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together, 
can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than 
his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, 
his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall 
I say, of all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him 
brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the 
Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of 
ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circum- 
stance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having 
is another. 

The great distinction between teachers sacred or hterary, 

— between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope, — be- 
tween philosophers Hke Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and 
philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stew- 
art, — between men of the world, who are reckoned accom- 
plished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophe- 
sying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, — is, 
that one class speak from within^ or from experience, as par- 
ties and possessors of the fact ; and the other class, from with- 



THE OVER-SOUL I57 

out, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the 
fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach 
to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus 
speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends 
all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand that 
it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expecta- 
tion of the appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do 
not speak from within the veil, where the word is one with 
that it tells of, let him lowly confess it. 

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes 
what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is 
not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no 
doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among 
the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing 
presence ; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of 
mspiration ; they have a light, and know not whence it comes, 
and call it their own ; their talent is some exaggerated faculty' 
some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease! 
In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the im- 
pression of virtue, but almost of vice ; and we feel that a man^s 
talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But 
genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common 
heart. It is not anomalous, but more like, and not less like 
other men. There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity 
which IS superior to any talents they exercise. The author, 
the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place 
of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in 
Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are content with 
truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid 
and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the fran- 
tic passion and violent coloring of inferior, but popular writers. 
For they are poets by the free course which they allow to the 
informing soul, which through their eyes beholds again, and" 
blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior 
to its knowledge ; wiser than any of its works. The great 
poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of 
his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to 
teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us 
to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a 
wealth which beggars his own ; and we then feel that the 
splendid works which he has created, and which in other 
hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger 



158 THE OVER-SOUL 

hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on 
the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and 
Lear could utter things as good from day to day, forever. Why, 
then, should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had 
not the soul from which they fell as syllables from tn.:. l^ongue ? 

This energy does not descend into individual life on any 
other condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly 
and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is 
foreign and proud ; it comes as insight ! it comes as serenity 
and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are 
apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that inspiration 
the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk 
with men with an eye. to their opinion. He tries them. It 
requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller at- 
tempts to embellish his life by quoting my lord, and the prince, 
and the countess, who thus said or did to him. The ambi- 
tious vulgar show you their spoons, and brooches, and rings, 
and preserve their cards and compliments. The more cul- 
tivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the 
pleasing, poetic circumstance, — the visit to Rome, the man 
of genius they saw, the brilliant friend they know ; still fur- 
ther on, perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, 
the mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yesterday, — and so 
seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul 
that ascends to worship the great God is plain and true ; has 
no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures ; does 
not want admiration ; dwells in the hour that now is, in the 
earnest experience of the common day, — by reason of the 
present moment and the mere trifle having become porous 
to thought, and bibulous of the sea of light. 

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and litera- 
ture looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are 
worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things 
of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gather- 
ing a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a 
phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are 
ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the circle, 
but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man 
in naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation. 

Souls such as these treat you as gods would ; walk as gods 
in the earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, your 
bounty, your virtue even, — say rather your act of duty, for 



THE OVER-SOUL 159 

your virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as them- 
selves, and over-royal, and the father of the gods. But what 
rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flat- 
tery with which authors solace each other and wound them- 
selves ! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men 
go to see Cromwell, and Christina, and Charles the Second, 
and James the First, and the Grand Turk. For they are, in 
their own elevation, the fellows of kings, and must feel the 
servile tone of conversation in the world. They must always 
be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a king to a 
king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature 
the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain human- 
ity, of even companionship, and of new ideas. They leave 
them wiser and superior men. Souls like these make us feel 
that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly 
with man and woman, as to constrain the utmost sincerity, 
and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest 
compliment you can pay. Their '^highest praising,'^ said 
Milton, ^^is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind 
of praising.'^ 

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the 
soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, 
becomes God : yet for ever and ever the influx of this better 
and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe 
and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises 
the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars 
of our mistakes and disappointments ! When we have broken 
our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then 
may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling 
of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart 
with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It 
inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, 
but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought 
easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and ad- 
journ to the sure revelation of time, the solution of his private 
riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of 
being. In the presence of law to his mind, he is overflowed 
with a reliance so universal, that it sweeps away all cherished 
hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its 
flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The 
things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are 
running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your 



160 THE OVER-SOUL 

mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce 
that it is best you should not find him ? for there is a power, 
which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very 
well bring you together, if it were for the best. You are pre- 
paring with eagerness to go and render a service to which your 
talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the 
hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you, that you have no 
right to go unless you are equally willing to be prevented from 
going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is 
spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, 
will vibrate on thine ear ! Every proverb, every book, every 
byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely 
come home through open or winding passages. Every friend 
whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart 
in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, 
because the heart in thee is the heart of all ; not a valve, not 
a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but 
one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through 
all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly 
seen, its tide is one. 

Let maA, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all 
thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells 
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, 
if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what 
the great God speaketh, he must ^ go into his closet and shut 
the door,' as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest 
to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing 
himself from all the accents of other men's devotion. Even 
their prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. 
Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. When- 
ever the appeal is made — no matter how indirectly — to 
numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion 
is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping thought to him 
never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who 
shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when 
I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say? 

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers 
or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. 
The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, 
the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given 
to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position 
of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter 



II 



THE OVER-SOUL 161 

the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no 
flatterer, it is no follower ; it never appeals from itself. It 
believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man, 
all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless 
and sainted, shrinks away. Before that heaven which our 
presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form 
of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we 
have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have 
none ; that we have no history, no record of any character 
or mode of living, that entirely contents us. The saints 
and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to- 
accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely 
hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, 
pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless 
and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives- 
itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and. 
Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and 
speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. 
It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not 
called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its; 
own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a. 
law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith,. 
I am born into the great, the universal mind, I, the imper- 
fect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the 
great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars^ 
and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change 
and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature 
enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards 
and actions. So come I to live in thoughts, and act with 
energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and 
learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense/' 
man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle 
which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular 
wonders ; he will learn that there is no profane history ; that 
all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an 
atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted 
life of shreds and patches, but he v/ill live with a divine unity. 
He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and. 
be content with all places and with any service he can render. 
He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that 
trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the wholes 
future in the bottom of the heart. 



CHARACTER 

The sun set ; but set not his hope : 
Stars rose ; his faith was earHer up : 
JFixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye : 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again ; 
His action won such reverence sweet, 
As hid all measure of the feat. 

Work of his hand 

He nor commends nor grieves : 

Pleads for itself the fact ; 

As unrepenting Nature leaves 

Her every act. 

I have read that those who listened to Lord Chatham 
felt that there was something finer in the man than anything 
which he said. It has been complained of our brilliant 
English historian of the French Revolution, that when he has 
told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify his esti- 
mate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others 
of Plutarch's heroes, do not in the record of facts equal their 
own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter 
Raleigh, are men of great figure, and of few deeds. We cannot 
find the smallest part of the personal weight of Washington in 
the narrative of his exploits. The authority of the name 
of Schiller is too great for his books. This inequality of the 
reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not accounted 
for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the 
thunder-clap; but somewhat resided in these men which 
begot an expectation that outran all their performance. 
The largest part of their power was latent. This is that 

162 



CHARACTER 163 

which we call Character, — a reserved force which acts 
directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived 
of as a certain undemonstrable force, a FamiHar or Genius, 
by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he 
cannot impart ; which is company for him, so that such men 
are often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not need 
society, but can entertain themselves very well alone. The 
purest literary talent appears at one time great, at another 
time small, but character is of a stellar and undiminishable 
greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence^ 
this man accomplishes by some magnetism. ^^Half his 
strength he put not forth.'' His victories are by demonstra- 
tion of superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He 
conquers, because his arrival alters the face of affairs. 
' '^O lole ! how did you know that Hercules was a god?'^ 
'^Because,'' answered lole, ^'I was content the moment my 
eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that 
I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in 
the chariot-race ; but Hercules did not wait for a contest ; he 
conquered whether he stood or walked, or sat, or whatever 
thing he did.'' ' Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only 
half attached, and that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, 
in these examples appears to share the life of things, and 
to be an expression of the same laws which control the tides 
and the sun, numbers and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration, and nearer home, 
I observe that in our political elections, where this element, 
if it appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we 
sufficiently understand its incomparable rate. The people 
know that they need in their representative much more than 
talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted. They 
cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, 
acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one who, before he was 
appointed by the people to represent them, was appointed by 
Almighty God to stand for a fact, — invincibl}^ persuaded 
of that fact in himself, — so that the most confident and the 
most violent persons learn that here is resistance on which 
both impudence and terror are wasted, namely, faith in 
a fact. The men who carry their points do not need to inquire 
of their constituents what they should say, but are them- 
selves the country which they represent : nowhere are its 
emotions or opinions so instant and true as in them; no- 



164 CHARACTER 

where so pure from a selfish infusion. The constituency 
-at home hearkens to their words, watches the color of their 
cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public 
assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank 
countrymen of the West and South have a taste for character, 
and like to know whether the New-Englander is a substantial • 
:man, or whether the hand can pass through him. 

The same motive force appears in trade. There are 
geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the state, or letters ; 
and the reason why this or that man is fortunate, is not to 
be told. It lies in the man : that is all anybody can tell you 
about it. See him, and you will know as easily why he 
succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his 
fortune. In the new objects we recognize the old game, the 
habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at second- 
hand, through the perceptions of somebody else. Nature 
seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural 
merchant, who appears not so much a private agent, as her 
factor and Minister of Commerce. His natural probity 
combines with his insight into the fabric of society, to put him 
above tricks, and he communicates to all his own faith, that 
contracts are of no private interpretation. The habit of 
his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity and 
pubhc advantage ; and he inspires respect, and the wish to 
deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends 
Mm, and for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle 
of so much ability affords. This immensely stretched trade, 
which makes the capes of the Southern Ocean his wharves, 
and the Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres in his brain 
only ; and nobody in the universe can make his place good. 
In his parlor, I see very v/ell that he has been at hard work 
this morning, with that knitted brow, and that settled 
humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot shake 
off. I see plainly how many firm acts have been done ; how 
many valiant noes have this day been spoken, when others 
would have uttered ruinous Tjeas. I see, with the pride of 
art, and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote 
combination, the consciousness of being an agent and play- 
fellow of the original laws of the world. He too believes 
that none can supply him, and that a man must be bom 
to trade, or he cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more, when it appears in 



CHARACTER 165 

sction to ends not so mixed. It works with most energy 
in the smallest companies and in private relations. In all 
cases, it is an extraordinary and incomputable agent. The 
excess of physical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher 
natures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a 
certain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and offer no 
resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. When 
the high cannot bring up the low to itself, it benumbs it, as 
man charms down the resistance of the lower animals. Men 
exert on each other a similar occult power. How often has 
the influence of a true master realized all the tales of magic ! 
A river of command seemed to run down from his eyes into 
all those who beheld him, a torrent of strong sad light, like 
an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded them with his thoughts, 
and colored all events with the hue of his mind. ^^What 
means did you employ? '^ was the question asked of the wife 
of Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; 
and the answer was, '^Only that influence which every 
strong mind has over a weak one.^' Cannot Caesar in irons 
shuffle off the irons, and transfer them to the person of Hippo 
or Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable 
a bond ? Suppose a slaver on the coast of Guinea should take 
on board a gang of negroes, which should contain persons of 
the stamp of Toussaint rOuverture : or, let us fancy under 
these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in chains. 
When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the 
ship's company be the same? Is there nothing but rope 
and iron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never 
a glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind ; and cannot 
these be supposed available to break, or elude, or in any 
manner overmatch, the tension of an inch or two of iron 
ring? 

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature 
co-operates with it. The reason why we feel one man's 
presence, and do not feel another's, is as simple as gravity. 
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the apphcation of 
it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, accord- 
ing to the purity of this element in them. The will of the 
pure runs down from them into other natures, as water runs 
down from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force 
is no more to be withstood, than any other natural force. 
We can drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but 



166 CHARACTER 

it is yet true that all stones will forever fall ; and whatever 
instances can be quoted of unpimished theft, or of a lie which 
somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is the privilege 
of truth to make itself beheved.- Character is this moral 
order seen through the medium of an individual nature. 
An . individual is an encloser. Time and space, Hberty and 
necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. 
Now, the universe is a close or pound. All things exist in 
the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what 
quahty is in him, he infuses all nature that he can reach; 
nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long 
a curve soever, all his regards return into his own good at 
last. He animates all he can, and he sees only what he ani- 
mates. He encloses the world, as the patriot does his country 
as a material basis for his character, and a theatre for action. 
A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, 
as the magnet arranges itseK with the pole, so that he stands 
to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and 
the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun journeys 
towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest 
influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus, men 
of character are the conscience of the society to which they 
belong. 

The natural measure of this power is the resistance of 
circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is reflected 
in opinions, events, and persons. They cannot see the action, 
until it is done. Yet its moral element pre-existed in the 
actor, and its quality as right or wrong, it was easy to pre- 
dict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and 
negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and 
a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event 
is the negative. Will is the north, action the south pole. 
Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the 
north. It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The 
feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative pole. They 
look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold 
a principle until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish 
to be lovely, but to be loved. Men of character like to hear 
of their faults : the other class do not like to hear of faults ; 
they worship events; secure to them a fact, a connection, 
a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask no more. 
The hero sees that the event is ancillary : it must follow him. 



CHARACTER 167 

A given order of events has no power to secure to him the 
satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it; the soul 
of goodness escapes from any set of circumstances, whilst 
prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that 
power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order 
of events. No change of circumstances can repair a de- 
fect of character. We boast our emancipation from many 
superstitions ; but if we have broken any idols, it is through 
a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no 
longer immolate a bull to Jove, or to Neptune, or a mouse 
to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or 
the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, 
— if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it ; or 
at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, 
or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or 
of murder? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? 
Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according 
to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are 
capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The covet ousness 
or the malignity which saddens me, when. I ascribe it to 
society, is my own. I am always environed by myself. 
On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated 
not by cries of joy, but by serenity, which is joy fixed or 
habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation 
of our truth and worth. The capitalist does not run every 
hour to the broker, to coin his advantages into current 
money of the realm ; he is satisfied to read in the quotations 
of the market, that his stocks have risen. The same trans- 
port which the occurrence of the best events in the best order 
would occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in the percep- 
tion that my position is every hour meliorated, and does 
already command those events I desire. That exultation 
is only to be checked by the foresight of an order of things 
so excellent, as to throw all our prosperities into the deepest 
shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness. 
I revere the person who is riches; so that I cannot think 
of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, 
but as perpetual patron, benefactor, and beatified man. 
Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced 
or overset, A man should give us a sense of mass. Society 
is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation 



168 CHARACTER 

into ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious 
man, I shall think myself poorly entertained if he give me 
nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette ; rather he shall 
stand stoutly in his place, and let me apprehend, if it were 
only his resistance ; know that I have encountered a new and 
positive quality; great refreshment for both of us. It is 
much, that he does not accept the conventional opinions and 
practices. That non-conformity will remain a goad and 
remembrancer, and every inquirer will have to dispose of 
him, in the first place. There is nothing real or useful that 
is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter, and 
personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the un- 
civil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to 
society, whom it cannot let pass in silence, but must either 
worship or hate, — and to whom all parties feel related, botK 
the leaders of opinion, and the obscure and eccentric, — he 
helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and 
destroys the scepticism which says, ^man is a doll, let us eat 
and drink, ^t is the best we can do,' by illuminating the untried 
and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment, and 
appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are 
not clear, and which must see a house built, before they can 
comprehend the plan of it. The wise man not only leaves 
out of his thought the many, but leaves out the few. Foun- 
tains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because 
he is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they are good ; 
for these announce the instant presence of supreme power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. 
In nature, there are no false valuations. A pound of water 
in the ocean-tempest has no more gravity than in a mid- 
summer pond. All things work exactly according to their 
quality, and according to their quantity; attempt nothing 
they cannot do, except man only. He has pretension: he 
wishes and attempts things beyond his force. I read in a 
book of English memoirs, ^^Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Hol- 
land) said, he must have the Treasury ; he had served up to 
it, and would have it.'' Xenophon and his Ten Thousand 
were quite equal to what they attempted, and did it: so 
equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand and inimitable 
exploit. Yet there stands that fact unrepeated, a high- 
water mark in military history. Many have attempted it 
since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality, that any 



CHARACTER 16^ 

power of action can be based. No institution will be better 
than the institutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished 
person who undertook a practical reform, yet I was never 
able to And in him the enterprise of love he took in hand. 
He adopted it by ear and by the understanding from the 
books he had been reading. All his action was tentative, 
a piece of the city carried out into the fields, and was the city 
still, and no new fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. 
Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible 
undemonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing his 
demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not enougk 
that the intellect should see the evils, and their remedy. 
We shall still postpone our existence, not take the ground ta 
which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought, and not 
a spirit that incites us. We have not yet served up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice 
of incessant growth. Men should be intelligent and earnest. 
They must also make us feel, that they have a controlling; 
happy future, opening before them, whose early twilights, 
already kindle in the passing hour. The hero is miscon- 
ceived and misreported : he cannot therefore wait to unravel 
any man's blunders : he is again on his road, adding new 
powers and honors to his domain, and new claims on your 
heart, which will bankrupt you, if you have loitered about 
the old things, and have not kept your relation to him, by 
adding to your wealth. New actions are the only apologies 
and explanations of old ones, which the noble can bear to 
offer or to receive. If your friend has displeased you, you 
sTiall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all 
m.emory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve 
you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with 
blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that 
is only measured by its works. Love is inexhaustible, and 
if its estate is wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and 
enriches, and the man, though he sleep, seems to purify the 
air, and his house to adorn the landscape and strengthen the 
laws. People always recognize this difference. We know 
who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of 
subscription to soup-societies. It is only low merits that 
can be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you 
what you have done well, and say it through ; but when they 



170 CHARACTER 



stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, 
and must suspend their judgment for years to come, you 
may begin to hope. Those who live to the future must al- 
ways appear selfish to those who hve to the present. There- 
fore it was droll in the good Riemer, who has written memoirs 
of Goethe, to make out a Ust of his donations and good deeds, 
as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, to 
Tischbein : a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a post 
under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, 
two professors recommended to foreign universities, etc., 
etc. The longest list of specifications of benefit would look 
very short. A man is a poor creature, if he is to be measured 
so. For, all these, of course, are exceptions; and the rule 
and hodiernal life of a good man is benefaction. The true 
charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave 
Dr. Eckermann, of the way in which he had spent his fortune-. 
^^Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a 
miUion of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary, 
and the large income derived from my writings for fifty years 
back, have been expended to instruct me in what I know now. 
I have besides seen,'' etc. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate 
traits of this simple and rapid power, and we are painting 
the lightning with charcoal ; but in these long nights and 
vacations, I like to console myself so. Notliing but itself 
can copy it. A word warm from the heart enriches me. 
I surrender at discretion. How death-cold is literary genius 
before this fire of life ! These are the touches that reanimate 
my heavy soul, and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. 
I find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most rich. 
Thence comes a new intellectual exultation, to be again 
rebuked by some new exhibition of character. Strange 
alternation of attraction and repulsion ! Character re- 
pudiates intellect, yet excites it ; and character passes into 
thought, is pubhshed so, and then is ashamed before new 
flashes of moral worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no use 
to ape it, or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of 
resistance, and of persistence, and of creation, to this power, 
which will foil all emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but Nature's 
have been laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly destined 



« 



CHARACTER 171 

shall slip up into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed 
Athens to watch and blazon every new thought, every blush- 
ing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately — very 
young children of the most high God — have given me 
occasion for thought. When I explored the source of their 
sanctity, and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each 
answered, ^^From my nonconformity: I never hstened to 
your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and 
wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural 
poverty of my own ; hence this sweetness : my work never 
reminds you of that ; — is pure of that.'' And nature 
advertises me in such persons, that, in democratic America, 
she will not be democratized. How cloistered and con- 
stitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal ! 
It was only this morning, that I sent away some wild flowers 
of these wood-gods. They are a relief from literature, — 
these fresh draughts from the sources of thought and senti- 
ment ; as we read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first 
hnes of written prose and verse of a nation. How captivating 
is their devotion to their favorite books, whether ^Eschylus, 
Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as feeling that they have a stake 
in that book : who touches that, touches them ; and especially 
the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from 
which he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall 
ever read this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, 
and not wake to comparisons, and to be flattered! Yet 
some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wher- 
ever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, 
there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn 
them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish 
of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. I remember the 
indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions 
of a Doctor of Divinity, ^^My friend, a man can neither be 
praised nor insulted." But forgive the counsels; they are 
very natural. I remember the thought which occurred to 
me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to 
America, was. Have you been victimized in being brought 
hither? — or, prior to that, answer me this, 'Are you 
victimizable V 

As I have said. Nature keeps these sovereignties in her own 
hands, and however pertly our sermons and disciplines would 
divide some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion 



172 CHARACTER 

the citizen, she goes her own gait, and puts the wisest in 
the wrong. She makes very hght of gospels and prophets, 
as one who has a great many more to produce, and no excess 
of time to spare on any one. There is a class of men, in- 
dividuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently 
endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been unani- 
mously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumulation 
of that power we consider. Divine persons are character 
born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory 
organized. They are usually received with ill-will, because 
they are new, and because they set a bound to the exag- 
geration that has been made of the personahty of the last 
divine person. Nature never rhymes her children, nor 
makes two men alike. When we see a great man, we fancy 
a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the 
sequel of his character and fortune, a result which he is sure 
to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem of his 
character according to our prejudice, but only in his own high 
unprecedented way. Character wants room; must not be 
crowded on by persons, nor be judged from ghmpses got in 
the press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, 
as a great building. It may not, probably does not, form 
relations rapidly ; and we should not require rash explanation, 
either on the popular ethics, or on our own, of its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the ApoUo 
and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait 
which the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and 
better than his copy. We have seen many counterfeits, 
but we are born behevers in great men. How easily we read 
in old books, when men were few, of the smallest action of 
the patriarchs. We require that a man should be so large 
and columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be 
recorded, that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed 
to such a place. The most credible pictures are those of 
majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and convinced 
the senses; as happened to the Eastern magian who was 
sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the 
Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp 
appointed a day on which the Mobeds of every country should 
assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani 
sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, 
advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage. 



CHARACTER 173 

on seeing that chief, said, '^This form and this gait cannot 
lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from them/^ Plato 
said, it was impossible not to believe in the children of the 
gods, *' though they should speak without probable or neces- 
sary arguments/' I should think myself very unhappy in 
my associates, if I could not credit the best things in history. 
"John Bradshaw,'' says Milton, "appears like a consul, from 
whom the fasces are not to depart with the year ; so that 
not on the tribunal only, but throughout his life, you would 
regard him as sitting in judgment upon kings/' I find it 
more creditable, since it is anterior information, that one 
man should know heaven^ as the Chinese say, than that so 
many men should know the world. "The virtuous prince 
confronts the gods, without any misgiving. He waits a 
hundred ages tiU a sage comes, and does not doubt. He who 
confronts the gods without any misgiving, knows heaven; 
he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without 
doubting, knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, 
and for ages shows empire the way.'' But there is no need 
to seek remote examples. He is a dull observer whose 
experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, 
as well as of chemistry. The coldest precision cannot go 
abroad without encountering inexplicable influences. One 
man fastens an eye on him, and the graves of the memory 
render up their dead ; the secrets that make him wretched 
either to keep or to betray must be yielded ; another, and he 
cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their 
cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, 
and eloquence to him; and there are persons he cannot 
choose but remember, who gave a transcendent expansion 
to his thought, and kindled another life in his bosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they 
spring from this deep root? The sufficient reply to the 
sceptic, who doubts the power and the furniture of man, is 
in that possibility of joyful intercourse with persons, which 
makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know 
nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound 
good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange 
of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom 
is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness 
which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics 
and commerce, and churches, cheap. For, when men shall 



174 CHARACTER 

meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, 
clothed with thoughts, with deeds, wdth accomphshments, 
it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. 
Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as 
all other things are s^nnbols of love. Those relations to 
the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances 
of youth, become, in the progress of the character, the most 
solid enjoyment. 

, If it were possible to live in right relations with men ! — if 
we could^ abstain from asking anything of them, from asking 
their praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compelling 
them through the virtue of the eldest laws ! Could we not 
deal with a few persons, — with one person, — after the 
.unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their efficacy ? 
Gould we not pa}^ our friend the compliment of truth, of 
silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him? 
If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the 
ancient world that no metamorphosis could hide a god from 
a god ; and there is a Greek verse which runs, 



^^The Gods are to each other not unknown." 

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity ; they gravi- 
tate to each other, and cannot otherwise; 



When each the other shall avoid, 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed. 



i 



Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must 
seat themselves without seneschal in our Olympus, and as 
they can install themselves by seniority divine. Society 
is spoiled, if pains are taken, if the associates are brought 
a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is a mischievous, 
low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the 
greatness of each is kept back, and every foible in painful 
activity, as if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff- 
boxes. 

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we 
are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if 
suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause ; our heat and hurry 
look foolish enough ; now pause, now possession, is required, 
and the power to swell the moment from the resources of 
the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations. 



CHARACTER 175 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; a friend is 
the hope of the heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment 
of these two in one. The ages are opening this moral force. 
All force is the shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful 
and strong, as it draws its inspiration thence. Men write 
their names on the world, as they are filled with this. History 
has been mean ; our nations have been mobs ; we have never 
seen a man : that divine form we do not yet know, but only 
the dream and prophecy of such : we do not know the majestic 
manners which belong to him, which appease and exalt the 
beholder. We shall one day see that the most private is 
the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, 
and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors 
them who never saw it. What greatness has yet appeared, 
is beginnings and encouragements to us in this direction^ 
The history of those gods and saints which the world has. 
written, and then worshipped, are documents of character.. 
The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed 
nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of 
his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an 
epic splendor around the facts of his death, which has trans- 
figured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes- 
of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.- 
But the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of 
character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king; 
which will rule animal and mineral virtues, and blend with 
the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral 
agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least, 
let us do them homage. In society, high advantages are 
set down to the possessor, as disadvantages. It requires 
the more wariness in our private estimates. I do not forgive 
in my friends the failure to know a fine character, and to 
entertain it with thankful hospitality. When, at last, that 
which we have always longed for, is arrived, and shines on us 
with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, 
then to be critical, and treat such a visitant with the jabber 
and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems 
to shut the doors of heaven. This is confusion, this the right 
insanity, when the soul no longer knows its own, nor where 
its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there any religion 
but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, 



176 CHARACTER 



i< 



the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it 
blooms for me ? if none sees it, I see it ; I am aware, if I alone, 
of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep - 
sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly I 
and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of this guest. " 
There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and 
household virtues ; there are many that can discern Genius ■ 
■on his starry track, though the mob is incapable : but when ^ 
that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, 
which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also 
a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any 
compliances, comes into our streets and houses, — only the 
pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compli- 
ment they can pay it, is to own it. 



MANNERS 

''How near to good is what is fair ! 
Which we no sooner see, 
But with the hnes and outward air 
Our senses taken be. 

*' Again yourselves compose, 
And now put all the aptness on 
Of Figure, that Proportion 

Or Color can disclose ; 
That if those silent arts were lost, 
Design and Picture, they might boast 

From you a newer ground. 
Instructed by the heightening sense 
Of dignity and reverence 

In their true motions found." 

— Ben Jonson. 

Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half 
live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee-Islanders 
getting their dinner off human bones ; and they are said to 
eat their own wives and children. The husbandry of the 
modern inhabitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is philo- 
sophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping, nothing is 
requisite but two or three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, 
and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely, a tomb, is 
ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the 
roof and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there 
is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they 
walk out and enter another, as there are several hundreds at 
their command. ''It is somewhat singular,^' adds Belzoni, 
to whom we owe this account, 'Ho talk of happiness among 
people who live in sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of 
an ancient nation which they know nothing of.'' In the deserts 

177 



178 MANNERS 

of Borgoo, the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like cliff- 
swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by 
their neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and to the whistling 
of birds. Again, the Bornoos have no proper names; indi- 
viduals are called after their height, thickness, or other acci- 
dental quality, and have nicknames merely. But the salt, 
the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible 
regions are visited, find their way into countries, where the 
purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one race 
with these cannibals and man-stealers ; countries where man 
serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, 
silk, and wool ; honors himself with architecture ; wTites laws, 
and contrives to execute tliis will through the hands of many 
nations ; and, especially, establishes a select society, running 
through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted 
aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, wdthout wTitten 
law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes 
every new-planted island, and adopts and makes its own 
whatever personal beauty or extraordinary native endow- 
ment anywhere appears. 

. What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the 
creation of the gentlem^an? Chivalr}^ is that, and loyalty is 
that, and, in English literature, half the drama, and all the 
novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this 
figure. The w^ord gentleman, which like the word Christian^ 
must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding 
centuries, by the importance attached to it, is a homage to 
personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fan- 
tastic additions have got associated with the name, but the 
steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed to the 
valuable properties which it designates. An element which 
unites all the most forcible persons of every country ; makes 
them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat 
so precise, that it is at once felt if an indi^'idual lack the ma- 
sonic sign, cannot be an}^ casual product, but must be an av- 
erage result of the character and faculties universally found 
in men. It seems a certain permanent average; as the at- 
mosphere is a permanent composition, whilst so many gases 
are combined only to be decompounded. Comme ilfaut, is the 
Frenchman's description of good society, as we must be. It 
is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that 
class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of 



MANNERS 179 

this hour, and, though far from pure, far from constituting 
the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as 
the whole society permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, 
more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result, 
into which every great force enters as an ingredient, namely, 
virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in use to ex- 
press the excellence of manners and social cultivation, because 
the quantities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by 
the senses as the cause. The word gentleman has not any 
correlative abstract to express the quality. Gentility is mean, 
and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the 
vernacular the distinction between fashion, a word of narrow 
and often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which 
the gentleman imports. The usual words, however, mugt be 
respected : they will be found to contain the root of the matter. 
The point of distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy, 
chivalry, fashion, and the like, is, that the flower and fruit, 
not the grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty 
which is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now 
in question, although our words intimate well enough the 
popular feeling, that the appearance supposes a substance. 
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and 
expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner 
dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or pos- 
sessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word 
denotes good-nature or benevolence : manhood first, and then 
gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition 
of ease and fortune ; but that is a natural result of personal 
force and love, that they should possess and dispense the 
goods of the world. In times of violence, every eminent per- 
son must fall in with many opportunities to approve his stout- 
ness and worth; therefore every man's name that emerged 
at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear like 
a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of 
fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in the moving 
crowd of good society, the men of valor and reality are known, 
and rise to their natural place. The competition is trans- 
ferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force 
appears readily enough in these new arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, 
bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and 



180 MANNERS 

clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the 
door; but whenever used in strictness, and with any em-1 
phasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.! 
It describes a man standing in his own right, and working! 
after untaught methods. In a good lord, there must first! 
be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incom- 
parable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must 
have more, but they must have these, giving in every com- 
pany the sense of power, which makes things easy to be done . 
which daunt the wise. The society of the energetic class, in 1 
their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of 1 
attempts, which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage I 
which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, or a sea-* 
fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies 
to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a 
base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of 
these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to 
the work of the world, and equal to their versatile office : 
men of the right Caesarian pattern, who have great range of 
affinity. I am far from believing the timid maxim of Lord 
Falkland ('Hhat for ceremony there must go two to it; since 
a bold fellow will go through the cunningest forms '0, and am 
of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms 
are not to be broken through ; and only that plenteous nature 
is rightful master, which is the complement of whatever per- 
son it converses with. My gentleman gives the law where 
he is; he will out pray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans 
in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good 
company for pirates, and good with academicians; so that 
it is useless to fortify yourself against him ; he has the private 
entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, 
as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have 
been of this strong type : Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Cse- 
sar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. 
They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent 
themselves, to value any condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular 
judgment, to the completion of this man of the world ; and 
it is a material deputy which walks through the dance which 
the first has led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity 
is, which transcends the habits of clique and caste, and makes 
itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid 



MANNERS 181 

in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will never be 
a leader in fashion ; and if the man of the people cannot speak 
on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman 
shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he 
is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas 
are gentlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the condi- 
tion of poverty, when that of wealth was equally open to 
them. I use these old names, but the men I speak of are 
my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every gen- 
eration one of these well-appointed knights, but every collec- 
tion of men furnishes some example of the class; and the 
politics of this country, and the trade of every town, are con- 
trolled by these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have in- 
vention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts 
them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action pop- 
ular. 

The manners of this class are observed and caught with 
devotion by men of taste. The association of these masters 
with each other, and with men intelligent of their merits, is 
mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good forms, the 
happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By 
swift consent, everything superfluous is dropped, everything 
graceful is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formi- 
dable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler science 
of defence to parry and intimidate ; but once matched by the 
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, — 
points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a 
more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less trouble- 
some game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the 
players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impedi- 
;ments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our 
dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by 
getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leav- 
ing nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms 
very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cul- 
tivated with the more heed, that it becomes a badge of social 
and civil distinctions. Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal 
semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, 
the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence 
assault in vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the class of power 
and the exclusive and polished circles. The last are always 



182 MANNERS 

filled or filling from the first. The strong men usually give 
some allowance even to the petulances of fashion, for that 
affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, 
destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the Fau- 
bourg St. Germain : doubtless with the feehng, that fashion is 
a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a strange 
way, represents all manly \drtue. It is \drtue gone to seed : 
it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the 
great, but the children of the great ; it is a hall of the Past. 
It usually sets its face against the great of this hour. Great 
men are not commonly in its halls : they are absent in the 
field : they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is made 
up of their children; of those who, through the value and 
virtue of somebody, haA^e acquired lustre to their name, marks 
of distinction, means' of cultivation and generosit}^, and, in 
their physical organization, a certain health and excellence, 
which secure to them, if not the highest power to work, yet 
high power to enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, 
the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the fes- 
tivity and permanent celebration of such as they ; that fashion 
is funded talent ; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten 
out thin ; that the brilliant names of fashion run back to just 
such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They 
are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons, 
in the ordinary course of things, must ^deld the possession 
of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger 
frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the 
year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was 
imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, 
long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is 
only country which came to town day before j^esterday; 
that is city and court to-day. 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These 
mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger 
in the least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge 
themselves on the excluding minority, by the strong hand, 
and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, as 
certainly as cream rises in a bowl of millv : and if the people 
should destroy class after class, until two men only were left, 
one of these would be the leader, and would be involuntarily 
served and copied by the other. You may keep this minority 
out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is 



MANNERS 183 

one of the estates of the realm. I am the more struck with 
this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the adminis- 
tration of such unimportant matters, that we should not look 
for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet men under 
some strong moral influence, as, a patriotic, a Uterary, a 
religious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules 
man and nature. We think all other distinctions and ties 
will be sHght and fugitive, this of caste or fashion, for example ; 
yet come from year to year, and see how permanent that is,, 
in this Boston or New York life of man, where, too, it has 
not the least countenance from the law of the land. Not in 
Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable hue. Here' 
are associations whose ties go over, and under, and through ' 
it, a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college class, 
a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious 
convention ; — the persons seem to draw inseparably near ; 
yet, that assembly once dispersed, its members will not in 
the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale 
of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen, 
earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion 
may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection 
can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man^s rank 
in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in 
his structure, or some agreement in his structure to the sym- 
metry of society. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural 
claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman finds his way 
in, and will keep the oldest patrician out, who has lost his 
intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding 
and personal superiority of whatever country readily frater- 
nize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes 
have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the- 
purity of their tournure. i, 

To say what good of fashion we can, — it rests on reality, 
and hates nothing so much as pretenders ; — to exclude and 
mystify pretenders, and send them into everlasting ^Coven- 
try,' is its delight. We contemn, in turn, every other gift 
of men of the world ; but the habit even in little and the least 
matters, of not appeahng to any but our own sense of pro- 
priety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There is 
almost no kind of self-rehance, so it be sane and proportioned, 
which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and give it the 
freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, 



184 MANNERS 

if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. 
But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings 
him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not giddy 
with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish 
to dance in waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled 
in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of 
the individual. The maiden at her first ball, the countryman 
at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual according to 
which every act and compliment must be performed, or the 
failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later, they 
learn that good sense and character make their own forms 
every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, 
' stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, 
or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and ab- 
original way; and that strong will is always in fashion, let 
who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands is 
composure, and seK-content. A circle of men perfectly well- 
bred would be a company of sensible persons, in which every 
man's native manners and character appeared. If the fash- 
ionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers 
of self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will 
show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks 
no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any 
deference to some eminent man or woman of the world for- 
feits all privilege of nobility. He is an underling; I have 
nothing to do with him ; I will speak with his master. A man 
should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society 
with him, — not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but 
atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the 
same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily 
associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and 
will be an orphan in the merriest club. '^If you could see 
Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on ! — " But Vich Ian Vohr. must 
always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as 
honor, then severed as disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons who are 
mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any 
time determine for the curious their standing in the world. 
These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their 
coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow 
them all their privilege. They are clear in their office, nor 
could they be thus formidable, wdthout their own merits. 



MANNERS 185 

But do not measure the importance of this class by their pre- 
tension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor 
and shame. They pass also at their just rate ; for how can 
they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort of herald^s office 
for the sifting of character? 

As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so, that 
appears in all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by 
name, introduce the parties to each other. Know you before 
all heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory ; 
they look each other in the eye ; they grasp each other's hand, 
to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. 
A gentleman never dodges ; his eyes look straight forward, and 
he assures the other party, first of all, that he has been met. 
For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities ? 
Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or, do we 
not insatiably ask. Was a man in the house? I may easily 
go into a great household where there is much substance, ex- 
cellent pro\^sion for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not 
encounter there any Amphitryon, who shall subordinate these 
appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who 
feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me ac- 
cordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal 
etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit, though it 
were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should 
wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though 
it were the Tuileries, or the Escurial, is good for anything 
without a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this 
hospitality. Everybody we know surrounds himself with 
a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and 
all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself 
and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, 
elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencon- 
tre front to front with his fellow ? It were unmerciful, I know, 
quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent 
convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too little. We 
call together many friends who keep each other in play, or, 
by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and 
guard our retirement. Or if, perchance, a searching realist 
comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, 
then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam 
at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, 
the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances 



186 MANNERS 

of Napoleon, by an immense pair of green spectacles. Na- 
poleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them 
off; and yet, Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, 
with eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair 
' of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with etiquette, and within 
triple barriers of reserve; and, as all the world knows from 
Madame de Stael, was wont, when he found himself observed, 
to discharge his face of all expression. But emperors and 
rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of good 
manners. No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking 
and dissimulation; and the first point of courtesy must al- 
ways be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point 
that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt^s translation, 
Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, and am struck 
with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions 
of the time. His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentle- 
man of France, is an event of some consequence. Wherever 
he goes, he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note 
resides upon his road, as a dtity to himself and to civilization. 
When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a few 
weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a per- 
petual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen. 

The compliment of this graceftil self-respect, and that of 
all the points of good-breeding I most require and insist upon, 
is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne, and 
hold a king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness, to an excess 
of fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature and 
the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. 
Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man 
enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred 
sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity 
and self-poise. We should meet each morning as from foreign 
countries, and spending the day together, should depart at 
night, as into foreign countries. In all things I would have 
the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, 
talking from peak to peak all around Olympus. No degree 
of affection need invade this religion. This is m5a"rh and 
rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should guard their 
strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into con- 
fusion and meanness. It is easy to push this deference to a 
Chinese etiquette ; but coolness and absence of heat and haste 



MANNERS 187 

indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise : a lady 
is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders 
who fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure 
some paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy 
of each with his neighbor's needs. Must we have a good 
understanding with one another's palates? as foolish people 
who have lived long together know when each wants salt or 
sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask 
me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask 
me for them, and not to hold out his plate as if I knew already. 
Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation and 
privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The compliments 
and ceremonies of our breeding should recall, however re- 
motely, the grandeur of our destiny. 

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, 
but if we dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts 
go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. 
To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the 
heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually 
the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for 
the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not 
quite sufficient to good-breeding, a union of kindness and in- 
dependence. We imperatively require a perception of, and 
a homage to, be/auty in our companions. Other virtues are 
in request in the field and work-yard, but a certain degree of 
taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better 
eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than 
with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities 
rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. 
The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less 
rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic 
class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to 
certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social in its 
nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It 
delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love 
of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses 
the superlative degree, or converses with heat, is quickly left 
alone. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must 
have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the 
want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and 
perfect the parts of the social instrument. Society will par- 
don much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature 



188 MANNERS 

a convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs 
to coming together. That makes the good and bad of man- 
ners, namely, what helps or hinders fellowship. For, fashion 
is not good sense absolute, but relative ; not good sense pri- 
vate, but good sense entertaining company. It hates corners 
and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, 
solitary, and gloom}^ people ; hates whatever can interfere 
with total blending of parties ; whilst it values all peculiar- 
ities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist 
with good fellowship. And besides the general infusion of 
wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual 
power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addi- 
tion to its rule and its credit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it 
must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Ac- 
curacy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to polite- 
ness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too punc- 
tual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of 
business at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. 
Society loves Creole natures, and sleepy, languishing manners, 
so that they cover sense, grace, and good-will : the air of 
drowsy strength, which disarms criticism ; perhaps, because 
such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, 
and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which 
does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences, that 
cloud the brow" and smother the voice of the sensitive. 

Therefore, beside personal force and so much perception 
as constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician 
cl^ss another element already intimated, which it significantly 
terms good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from 
the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights 
of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall 
run against one another, and miss the way to our food ; but 
intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society 
is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not 
happy in the company, cannot find any word in his memory 
that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little im- 
pertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn 
of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduc- 
tion of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, 
and what it calls whole souls, are able men, and of more spirit 
than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who 



MANNERS 189 

exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and content- 
ing, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party 
or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in gentlemen, 
furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good 
model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who 
added to his great abilities the most social disposition, and 
real love of men. Parliamentary history has few better pas- 
sages than the debate, in which Burke and Fox separated in 
the House of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend 
the claims of old friendship with such tenderness, that the 
house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to 
my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who 
had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, 
found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment. 
^^No,'^ said Fox, "I owe this money to Sheridan : it is a debt 
of honor : if an accident should happen to me, he has nothing 
to show.^' ^'Then,'^ said the creditor, ^^I change my debt 
into a debt of honor,'' and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked 
the man for his confidence, and paid him, saying, ^' his debt 
was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait.'' Lover of 
liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he 
possessed a great personal popularity ; and Napoleon said 
of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, ^'Mr. 
Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at the 
Tuileries." 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, 
whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The 
painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision 
on what we say. But 1 will neither be driven from some 
allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the 
belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain 
that, if we can ; but by all means we must affirm this. Life 
owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion 
which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, 
only a ball-room code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, 
in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is 
something necessary and excellent in it ; for it is not to be 
supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything 
preposterous ; and the respect which these mysteries inspire 
in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity 
with which details of high life are read, betray the universal- 
ity of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic 



190 MANNERS 

disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 
'^ first circles," and apply these terrific standards of justice, 
beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found there. 
Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are 
not. Fashion has many classes and many rules of probation 
and admission; and not the best alone. There is not only 
the right of conquest, which genius pretends, — the individual, 
demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the best ; — 
but less claims will pass for the time ; for Fashion loves Uons, 
and points, like Circe, to her horned company. This gentle- 
man is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is 
my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat ; here is 
Captain Friese, from Cape Tumagain ; and Captain Sjmames, 
from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who 
came down this morning in a balloon ; Mr. Hobnail, the re- 
former ; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole 
torrid zone in his Sunday School ; and Signor Torre del Greco, 
who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of 
Naples ; Spahi, the Persian ambassador ; and Tul Wil Shan, 
the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. — 
But these are monsters of one day, and to-morrow will be 
dismissed to their holes and dens ; for, in these rooms, every 
chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and in general, 
the clerisy, win their way up into these places, and get repre- 
sented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another 
mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and 
a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne- 
water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly 
grounded in all the biography, and politics, and anecdotes 
of the boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be 
grotesque sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. 
Let the creed and commandments even have the saucy hom- 
age of parody. The forms of politeness universally express 
benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they are in the 
mouths of selfish men, and used as means of selfishness? 
What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out of the 
world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address 
his companion, as civilly to exclude all others from his dis- 
course, and also to make them feel excluded? Real service 
will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely French 
and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed, that living blood 



MANNERS 191 

and a passion of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentle- 
man from Fashion^s. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not 
wholly unintelligible to the present age. '^Here lies Sir Jen- 
kin Grout, who loved his friend, and persuaded his enemy : 
what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants 
robbed, he restored : if a woman gave him pleasure, he sup- 
ported her in pain : he never forgot his children : and whoso 
touched his finger, drew after it his whole body/^ Even the 
line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some 
admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, 
who jumps in to rescue a drowning man ; there is still some 
absurd inventor of charities ; some guide and comforter of 
runaway slaves ; some friend of Poland ; some Philhellene ; 
some fanatic who plants shade trees for the second and third 
generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some well- 
concealed piety ; some just man happy in an ill-fame ; some 
youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impatiently cast- 
ing them on other shoulders. And these are the centres of 
society, on which it returns for fresh impulses. These are 
the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty 
of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, 
the doctors and apostles of this church : Scipio, and the Cid, 
and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and 
vahant heart, who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. 
The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not 
found in the actual aristocracy, or, only on its edge ; as the 
chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just 
outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the 
seneschals, who do not know their sovereign, when he appears. 
The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty 
of these. It divines afar off their coming. It says with the 
elder gods, — 

^'As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ; 
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, 
In form and shape compact and beautiful ; 
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads ; 
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us, 
And fated to exoell us, as we pass 
In glory that old Darkness : 

-for, 't is the eternal law, 

That first in beauty shall be first in might. '^ 



192 MANNERS 



thereB' 



Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, 
is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and 
flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal 
of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court, thdH| 
parliament of love and chivalry. And this is constituted" 
of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native, with 
the love of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to 
embellish the passing day. If the individuals who compose 
the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood 
of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that 
we could, at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we 
might find no gentleman, and no lady ; for, although excellent 
specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in 
the assemblage, in the particulars we should detect offence. 
Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. There 
must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclu- 
sion of impertinences will not avail. It must be genius which 
takes that direction : it must be not courteous, but courtesy. 
High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is 
praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor 
and conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings 
and queens, nobles, and great ladies, had some right to com- 
plain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths, 
before the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dia- 
logue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart 
epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and 
does not please on the second reading : it is not warm with 
life. In Shakspeare alone, the speakers do not strut and 
bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many 
titles that of being the best-bred man in England, and in 
Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted 
to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a 
man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose 
character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A 
beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful 
behavior is better than a beautiful form : it gives a higher 
pleasure than statues or pictures ; it is the finest of the fine 
arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects 
of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his coun- 
tenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, 
and in his manners equal the majesty of- the world. I have 
seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within 



MANNERS 193 

the conventions of elegant society, were never -learned there, 
but were original and commanding, and held out protection 
and prosperity ; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, 
but carried the holiday in his eye ; who exhilarated the fancy 
by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence ; who 
shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited 
bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with 
the port of an emperor, — if need be, calm, serious, and fit 
to stand the gaze of millions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers, 
are the places where Man executes his will ; let him yield or 
divide the sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with 
her instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a love of 
trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of 
that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment, which is 
indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American in- 
stitutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment, I 
esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. 
A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men, 
may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. 
Certainly, let her be as much better placed in the laws and 
in social forms, as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I 
confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that 
I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. 
The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times 
into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of 
Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia ; and, by the firmness with which 
she treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest cal- 
culators that another road exists, than that which their feet 
know. But besides those who make good in our imagination 
the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not women 
who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the 
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume ; who inspire 
us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues, and we speak; 
who anoint our eyes, and we see? We say things we never 
thought to have said ; for once, our walls of habitual reserve 
vanished, and left us at large ; we were children playing with 
children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these 
influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets, 
and will write out in many-colored words the romance that 
you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi who said of his Per- 
sian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and astonished me 



194 MANNERS 

by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, 
every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her. 
She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous 
persons into one society : like air or water, an element of 
such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily with 
a thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will 
be more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so 
that whatsoever she did became her. She had too much 
sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say, her 
manners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could 
surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion. She 
did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the 
seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be writ- 
ten upon her. For, though the bias of her nature was not 
to thought, but to sjmipathy, yet was she so perfect in her 
own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the fulness of 
her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as 
she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show them- 
selves noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, 
which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at 
the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is 
not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution 
of our society makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth 
who have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, 
and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and priv- 
ileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is 
shadowy and relative : it is great by their allowance : its 
proudest gates will fly open at the approach of their courage 
and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who 
are predisposed to suffer from the t}Tannies of this caprice, 
there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple 
of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most 
extreme susceptibility. For, the advantages which fashion 
values are plants which thrive in very confined localities, 
in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for 
nothing ; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, 
in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, 
at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. 
The worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste 
for the emblem. Everything that is called fashion and cour- 



MANNERS 195 

tesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, 
creator of titles and dignities, namely, the heart of love. This 
is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries and 
contingencies, will work after its kind, and conquer and ex- 
pand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to 
every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no gran- 
deur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to 
help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccen- 
tric ; rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the 
itinerant with his consul's paper which commends him ''To 
the charitable,'' the swarthy Italian with his few broken 
words of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from 
town to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man 
or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your 
house, from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make 
such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made 
them both remember and hope? What is vulgar, but to 
refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is 
gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours one 
holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart, 
wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not 
afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at 
his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and deep, that 
although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran, as 
to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there never a poor out- 
cast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his 
beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet 
madness in his brain, but fled at once to him, — that great 
heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the 
country, — that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers 
drew them to his side. And the. madness which he harbored, 
he did not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be 
rightly rich? 

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very 
ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand. It is 
easy to see, that what is called by distinction society and 
fashion, has good laws as well as bad, has much that is neces- 
sary, antl much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and 
too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan 
mythology, in any attempt to settle its character. 'I over- 
heard Jove, one day,' said Silenus, 'talking of destroying the 
earth ; he said, it had failed ; they were all rogues and vixens, 



198 MANNERS 

who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded 
€ach other. Minerva said, she hoped not ; they were only 
ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that 
they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen 
near ; if you called them bad, they would appear so ; if you 
called them good, they would appear so ; and there was no 
one person or action among them, which would not puzzle 
her owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was 
fundamentally bad or good.' 



POLITICS 

Gold and iron are good 

To buy iron and gold ; 

All earth's fleece and food 

For their like are sold. 

Hinted Merlin wise, 

Proved Napoleon great, — 

Nor kind nor coinage buys 

Aught above its rate. 

Fear, Craft, and Avarice 

Cannot rear a State. 

Out of dust to build 

What is more than dust, — 

Walls Amphion piled 

Phoebus stablish must. 

When the Muses nine 

With the Virtues meet. 

Find to their design 
^ An Atlantic seat, 

By green orchard boughs 
> Fended from the heat, 

Where the statesman ploughs 

Furrow for the wheat ; 

When the Church is social worth. 

When the state-house is the hearth, 

Then the perfect State is come. 

The republican at home. 

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its 
institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before 
we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: 
that every one of them was once the act of a single man : 
every law and usage was a man^s expedient to meet a par- 
ticular case : that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we may 
make as good ; we may make better. Society is an illusion 

197 



198 POLITICS 

to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with 
certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to 
the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they 
can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; 
there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may 
suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel 
the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, 
like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man 
of truth, Hke Plato, or Paul, does forever. But pohtics rest 
on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. 
Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the 
laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy 
and modes of living, and emplojTxients of the population, 
that commerce, education, and rehgion, may be voted in or 
out ; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be 
imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to 
make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation 
is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the 
State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress 
of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; 
and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and 
that the form of government which prevails, is the expression 
of what cultivation exists in the population which permits 
it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, 
and esteem the statute somewhat : so much life as it has in 
the character of living men, is its force. The statute stands 
there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye 
this article to-day? Our statute is a currency, which we 
stamp with our o^m portrait : it soon becomes unrecog- 
nizable, and in process of time will return to the mint. Na- 
ture is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, 
and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority, 
by the pert est of her sons ; and as fast as the public mind is 
opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and 
stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made 
to. Meantime the education of the general mind never 
stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. 
What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints 
to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall pres- 
ently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried 
as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and 
then shall be triumphant law and estabUshment for a hundred 



POLITICS 199 

years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pic- 
tures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the 
progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy 
of culture and of aspiration. 

The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind of 
men, and which they have expressed the best they could in 
their laws and in their revolutions, considers persons and 
property as the two objects for whose protection government 
exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being 
identical in nature. This interest, of course, with its whole 
power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as 
persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their 
rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his 
clothes, and another owns a county. This accident, depend- 
ing, primarily, on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which 
there is every degree, and secondarily, on patrimony, falls 
unequally, and its rights, of course, are unequal. Personal 
rights, universally the same, demand a government framed 
on the ratio of the census : property demands a government 
framed on the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who 
has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an officei 
on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them off, and 
pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds, and no 
fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It 
seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal rights 
to elect the officer who is to defend their persons, but that 
Laban, and not Jacob, should elect the officer who is to guard 
the sheep and cattle. And, if question arise whether addi- 
tional officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not 
Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds 
to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this, and with 
more right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and a 
traveller, eats their bread and not his own? 

In the earliest society the proprietors made their own 
wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in the direct 
way, no other opinion would arise in any equitable com- 
munity, than that property should make the law for property, 
and persons the law for persons. 

But property passes through donation or inheritance to 
those who do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as 
really the new owner's, as labor made it the first owner's : 
in the other case, of patrimony, the law makes an ownership, 



200 POLITICS 

which will be valid in each man's view according to the 
estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity. 

It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily 
admitted principle, that property should make law for prop- 
erty, and persons for persons : since persons and property 
mixed themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed 
settled, that the rightful distinction was, that the proprietors 
should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors, 
on the Spartan principle of ^'caUing that which is just, equal ; 
not that which is equal, just.'' 

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared 
in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether 
too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to prop- 
erty, and such a structure given to our usages, as allowed the 
rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them poor; but 
mainly, because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure 
and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, 
on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on per- 
sons deteriorating and degrading ; that truly, the only interest 
for the consideration of the State is persons; that property 
will always follow persons; that the highest end of govern- 
ment is the culture of men : and if men can be educated, the 
institutions will share their improvement, and the moral, 
sentiment will write the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, th( 
peril is less when we take note of our natui-al defences. We 
are kept by better guards than the vigilance of such magis-. 
t rates as we commonly elect. Society always consists, in 
greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who 
have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, 
die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their 
own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such 
an ignorant and deceivable majority. States would soon run 
to ruin, but that there are limitations, beyond which the 
folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have 
their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled 
with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow, 
unless it is planted and manured; but the farmer will not 
plant or hoe it, unless the chances are a hundred to one that 
he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms, persons and 
property must and will have their just sway. The}'' exert 
their power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a 



]i 



41 



POLITICS 201 

pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it ,*: 
melt it to liquid, convert it to gas; it will always weigh a. 
pound ; it will always attract and resist other matter, by the^ 
full virtue of one poimd weight ; — and the attributes of a. 
person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any 
law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, — if not 
overtly, then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; 
if not wholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or hy 
might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix,, 
as persons are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under* 
the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of mul- 
titudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the 
powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A 
nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest,, 
can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve 
extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means ; as,. 
the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the 
French have done. 

In like manner, to every particle of property belongs its: 
own attraction. A cent is the representative of a certain 
quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in tha 
necessities of the animal man. It is so much v/armth, so 
much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may 
do what it will with the owner of property, its just power 
will still attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say, 
that all shall have power except the owners of property; 
they shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the 
property will, year after year, write every statute that re- 
spects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of 
the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole 
power of property will do, either through the law, or else in 
defiance of it. Of course, I speak of all the property, not 
merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as: 
frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which 
exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns something, 
if it is only a cow, or a wheelbarrow, or his arms, and so has 
that property to dispose of. 

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and 
property against the malignity or folly of the magistrate^ 
determines the form and methods of governing, which are 
proper to each nation, and to its habit of thought, and no- 



202 POLITICS 

wise transferable to other states of society. In this country, 
we are very vain of our political institutions, which are 
singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of liv- 
ing men, from the character and condition of the people, which 
they still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we osten- 
tatiously prefer them to any other in history. They are not 
better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting 
the advantage in modern times of the democratic form, but 
to other states of society, in which religion consecrated the 
monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy 
is better for us, because the religious sentiment of the present 
time accords better with it. Born democrats, we are nowise 
qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living 
in the monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our 
institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, 
have not any exemption from the practical defects which have 
discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. 
Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on 
government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in 
the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, 
intimating that the State is a trick ? 

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse 
appear in the parties into which each State divides itself, of 
opponents and defenders of the administration of the govern- 
ment. Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better 
guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their 
leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but 
rudely mark some real and lasting relation.' We might as 
wisely reprove the east-wind, or the frost, as a political party, 
whose members, for the most part, could give no account of 
their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in 
which they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins, 
when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of 
some leader, and, obeying personal considerations, throw 
themselves into the maintenance and defence of points, 
nowise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually 
corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the associa- 
tion from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to 
their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and 
zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties 
are parties of circumstance, and not of principle ; as, the 
planting interest in conflict with the commercial ; the party 



POLITICS 203 

of capitalists, and that of operatives ; parties which are iden- 
tical in their moral character, and which can easily change 
ground with each other, in the support of many of their 
measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the 
party of free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of 
slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, degenerate into 
personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our 
leading parties in this country (which may be cited as a fair 
specimen of these societies of opinion) is, that they do not 
plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which 
they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury 
in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise 
useful to the commonwealth. Of the two great parties, 
which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, 
I should say, that, one has the best cause, and the other con- 
tains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the re- 
ligious man will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the 
democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition 
of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every 
manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources 
of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons 
whom the so-called popular party propose to him as repre- 
sentatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the 
ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and 
virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is 
destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior 
and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and 
selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, com- 
posed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the 
population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It 
vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no 
crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor 
write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish 
schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor 
befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From 
neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to 
expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with 
the resources of the nation. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are 
not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of 
ferocious parties, human nature always finds itself cherished, 
as the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to 



204 POLITICS 

have as healthy a moral sentiment as other children. Citi- 
zens of feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institu- 
tions lapsing into anarchy ; and the older and more cautious 
among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look with 
some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our 
license of construing the Constitution, and in the despotism 
of public opinion, we have no anchor; and one foreign ob- 
server thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of 
Marriage among us; and another thinks he has found it in 
our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security 
more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, 
saying, ^Hhat a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, 
but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom ; 
whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then 
your feet are always in water.'' No forms can have any 
dangerous importance, whilst we are befriended by the laws 
of things. It makes no difference how many tons' weight of 
atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure 
resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand- 
fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is equal 
to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal 
and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own ac- 
tivity develops the other. Wild liberty develops iron con- 
science. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, 
stupefies conscience. ^Lynch-law' prevails only where there 
is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders. A 
mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest requires 
that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which 
shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in 
them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, 
and an abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript 
of the common conscience. Governments have their origin 
in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be 
reason for another, and for every other. There is a middle 
measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so many, or 
so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for 
his simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, 
which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these decisions all 
the citizens find a perfect agreement, and only in these ; not 
in what is good to eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what 
amount of land, or of public aid, each is entitled to claim. 



POLITICS 205 

This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make appli- 
cation of, to the measuring of land, the apportionment of 
service, the protection of life and property. Their first, 
endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet absolute right 
is the first governor; or, every government is an impure 
theocracy. The idea, after which each community is aiming 
to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man. The 
wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkw^ard but- 
earnest efforts to secure his government by contrivance ; as, 
by causing the entire people to give their voices on every 
measure ; or, by a double choice to get the representation of 
the whole ; or, by a selection of the best citizens ; or, to secure 
the advantages of efficiency and internal peace, by confiding 
the government to one, who may himself select his agents.. 
All forms of government symbolize an immortal government^ 
common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, per- 
fect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man. 
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him 
of the character of his fellows. My right and my wrong is. 
their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, 
and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall 
often agree in our means, and work together for a time to 
one end„ But whenever I find my dominion over myself not. 
sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I 
overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I 
may have so much more skill or strength than he, that he 
cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, 
and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature 
cannot maintain the assumption : it must be executed by a 
practical lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for another 
is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the govern- 
ments of the world. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a 
pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a. 
great difference between my setting myseK down to a self- 
control, and my going to make somebody else act after my 
views : but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell 
me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the cir- 
cumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. 
Therefore, all public ends look vague and quixotic beside 
private ones. For, any laws but those which men make for 
themselves are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my 
child, and we stand in one thought, and see that things are- 



206 POLITICS 

thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are 
both there, both act. But if, without carrying him into the 
thought, I look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is 
with him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me. This 
is the history of governments, — one man does something 
which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted 
with me taxes me ; looking from afar at me, ordains that a 
part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as 
I, but as he, happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. 
Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What 
a satire is this on government ! Everywhere they think they 
get their money's worth, except for these. 

Hence, the less government we have the better, — the 
fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to 
this abuse of formal government is, the influence of private 
character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of 
the principal to supersede the proxy ; the appearance of the 
wise man, of whom the existing government is, it must be 
owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend 
to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolu- 
tions, go to form and dehver, is character ; that is the end of 
nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To edu- 
cate the wise man, the State exists ; and with the appearance 
of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of 
character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is 
the State. He needs no army, fort, or nav}^, — he loves men 
too well ; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him ; 
no vantage-ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no 
library, for he has not done thinking ; no church, for he is a 
prophet ; no statute-book, for he has the lawgiver ; no money, 
for he is value ; no road, for he is at home where he is ; no 
experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and 
looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who 
has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, 
needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a 
select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic ; his mem- 
ory is myrrh to them ; his presence, frankincense and flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet 
only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our 
barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. 
As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all 
rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. 



POLITICS 207 

Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it ; the Annual Register is 
silent ; in the Conversations^ Lexicon, it is not set down ; the 
President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not men- 
tioned it ; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which 
genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world. The 
gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all their frocks of 
force and simulation, the presence of worth. I think the very 
strife of trade and ambition is confession of this divinity; 
and successes in those fields are the poor amends, the fig- 
leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its naked- 
ness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It is 
because we know how much is due from us, that we are 
impatient to show some petty talent as a substitute for 
worth. We are haunted by a conscience of this right to 
grandeur of character, and are false to it. But each of us 
has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or graceful, or 
formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an 
apology to others and to ourselves, for not reaching the 
mark of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us^ 
whilst we thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may 
throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow^ 
or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad. 
We do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation^ 
and we are constrained to reflect on our splendid moment, 
with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as 
one act of many acts, a fair expression of our permanent 
energy. Most persons of ability meet in society with a kind 
of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, 'I am not all here.* 
Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain 
' enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, 
but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their man- 
hood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compen- 
sation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. 
They must do what they can. Like one class of forest 
animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail : climb they 
must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that 
he could enter into strict relations with the best persons, and 
make life serene around him by the dignity and sweetness of 
his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the 
caucus and the press, and covet relations so hollow and 
pompous, as those of a politician? Surely nobody would 
be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere. 



208 POLITICS 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-govern- 
ment, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards 
and penalties of liis own constitution, which work with more 
energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial re- 
straints. The movement in this direction has been very 
marked in modern history. Much has been blind and dis- 
creditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected 
by the vices of the revolters ; for this is a purely moral force. 
It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. 
It separates the individual from all party, and unites him, 
at the same time, to the race. It promises a recognition of 
higher rights than those of personal freedom or the security 
of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be 
trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as 
the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not 
imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every 
tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in cert.ain 
social conventions ; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters 
carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government 
of force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent that 
all competition is hopeless? could not a nation of friends 
even devise better ways ? On the other hand, let not the most 
conservative and timid fear anything from a premature sur- 
render of the bayonet, and the system of force. For, accord- 
ing to the order of nature, which is quite superior to our will, 
it stands thus : there will always be a government of force, 
where men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to 
abjure the code of force, they will be wise enough to see how 
these public ends of the post-office, of the highway, of com- 
merce, and the exchange of property, of museums and libraries, 
of institutions of art and science, can be answered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unmlling 
tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, 
among the most rehgious and instructed men of the most 
rehgious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, 
and a sufficient belief in the unit}^ of things, to persuade them 
that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, 
as well as the solar system ; or that the private citizen might 
be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a 
jail or a confiscation. What is strange, too, there never was 
in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to in- 
spire him with the broad design of renovating the State on 



POLITICS 209 

the principle of right and love. All those who have pre- 
tended this design have been partial reformers, and have 
admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. 
I do not call to mind a single human being who has steadily 
denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of 
his own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full 
of faith as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as 
air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare to 
think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen ; 
and men of talent, and women of superior sentiments, can- 
not hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue 
to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, 
and there are now men, — if indeed I can speak in the plural 
number, — more exactly, I will say, I have just been con- 
versing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experi- 
ence will make it for a moment appear impossible, that 
thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other 
the grandest and truest sentiments, as well as a knot of 
friends, or a pair of lovers. , 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

A Lecture read before the Society in Amory Hall, on 
Sunday, March 3, 1844. 

In the suburb, in the town, 
On the railway, in the square. 
Came a beam of goodness down 
Doubhng dayhght everywhere : 
Peace now each for malice takes, 
Beauty for his sinful weeds ; 
For the angel Hope aye makes 
Him an angel whom she leads. 

, Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with society 
in New England, during the last twenty-five years, with 
those middle and with those leading sections that may con- 
stitute any just representation of the character and aim of 
the community, will have been struck with the great activity 
of thought and experimenting. His attention must be 
commanded by the signs that the Church, or religious party, 
is falling from the church nominal, and is appearing in 
temperance and non-resistance societies, in movements of 
abolitionists and of socialists, and in very significant assem- 
blies, called Sabbath and Bible Conventions, — composed 
of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, 
and meeting to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, 
of the priesthood, and of the church. In these movements, 
nothing was more remarkable than the discontent they begot 
in the movers. The spirit of protest and of detachment 
drove the members of these Conventions to bear testimony 
against the church, and immediately afterward, to declare 
their discontent with these Conventions, their independence 
of their colleagues, and their impatience of the methods 
whereby they were working. They defied each other, like 
a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and 

210 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 211 

a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What 
a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One 
apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another, 
that no man should buy or sell ; that the use of money was 
the cardinal evil ; another, that the mischief was in our diet, 
that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened 
bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was 
in vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast, as well 
as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves 
vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine ele- 
ment in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more 
digestible. No ; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but 
it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant 
advances of thine : let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels ! 
Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal 
manures in farming; and the tyranny of man over brute 
nature ; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be 
^ taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hun- 
dred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must 
walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. 
Even the insect world was to be defended, — that had been 
too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground- 
worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without 
delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of 
hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their won- 
derful theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed 
particular vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the mer- 
chant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. 
Others attacked the institution of marriage, as the fountain 
of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying 
of churches and meetings for public worship ; and the fertile 
forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans seemed 
to have their match in the plenty of the new harvest of reform. 
With this din of opinion and debate, there was a keener 
scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than any we had 
known, there was sincere protesting against existing evils, 
and there were changes of emplojnnent dictated by conscience. 
No doubt, there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of back- 
sliding might occur. But in each of these movements 
emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption of simpler 
methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the private 
man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius of the 



212 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

age, what happened in one instance, when a church censured 
and threatened to excommunicate one of its members, on 
account of the somewhat hostile part to the church, which his 
conscience led him to take in the antislavery business ; the 
threatened individual immediately excommunicated the 
church in a public and formal process. This has been several 
times repeated : it was excellent when it was done the first 
time, but, of course, loses all value when it is copied. Every 
project in the history of reform, no matter how violent and 
surprising, is good, when it is the dictate of a man's genius 
and constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted 
from another. It is right and beautiful in any man to say, 
* I will take this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of 
yours,' — in whom we see the act to be original, and to flow 
from the whole spirit and faith of him ; for then that taking 
will have a giving as free and divine : but we are very easily 
disposed to resist the same generosity of speech, when we 
miss originality and truth to character in it. 

There was in all the practical acti\dties of New England, 
for the last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of 
tender consciences from the social organizations. There 
is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical 
and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the 
thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on 
spiritual facts. 

In politics for example, it is easy to see the progress of 
dissent. The country is full of rebellion; the country is 
full of kings. Hands off! let there be no control and no 
interference in the administration of the affairs of this king- 
dom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the 
party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experi- 
ment, in the face of what appear incontestable facts. I 
confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive 
to me, that I can seldom find much appetite to read what 
is below it in its columns, ^^The world is governed too much.'' 
So the country is frequently affording solitary examples of 
resistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw 
themselves on their reserved rights ; nay, who have reserved 
all their rights; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk 
of court, that they do not know the State, and embarrass 
the courts of law, by non-juring, and the commander-in- 
chief of the militia, by non-resistance. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 213 

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in 
civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, 
prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected 
quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought 
my coat? Why should professional labor and that of the 
counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor 
of the porter and woodsawyer? This whole business of 
Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false 
relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count ' 
myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly '. 
to that person whom I pay with money, whereas if I had not 
that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in 
all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as 
being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those 
aids and services which each asked of the other. Am I not 
too protected a person ? is there not a wide disparity between 
the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor 
sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss 
of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergencies 
of poverty constitute; I find nothing healthful or exalting 
in the smooth conventions of society ; I do not like the close 
air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner^ 
though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay 
a destructive tax in my conformity. 

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts 
for the reform of Education. The popular education has 
been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was com- 
plained that an education to things was not given. We are 
students of words : we are shut up in schools, and colleges, 
and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out 
at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not 
know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our 
eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the 
woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour 
of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. 
We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of 
a spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy nothing that 
he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, 
'All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.' And 
it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to 
hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and 
not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. The lessons of 



214 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

science should be experimental also. The sight of the planet 
through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; 
the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all the 
theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an 
artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed 
on our scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The 
ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain 
w^onderful remains of genius, which draw, and always will 
draw, certain like minded men, — Greek men, and Roman 
men, in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderful 
drowsiness of usage, they had exacted the study of all men. 
Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict 
relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, 
and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some 
era of activity in ph^^sical science. These things become 
stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the 
Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men 
and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, 
it had quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and 
w^as now creating and feeding other matters at other ends 
of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this 
warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or 
ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon 
as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously styled, he 
shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of 
young men are graduated at our colleges in this country 
^ every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read 
Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with 
ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. 

But is not this absurd, that the whole Hberal talent of 
this country should be directed in its best years on studies 
which lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some 
intelligent persons said or thought : ^ Is that Greek and 
Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? 
If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come 
at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjur- 
ing is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, 
and go straight to affairs.' So they jumped the Greek and 
Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To 
the astonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground 
at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 215 

months the most conservative circles of Boston and New 
York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college- 
bred, and who was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation, 
and in the rudest democratical movements, through all the 
petulance and all the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast 
aside the superfluous, and arrive at short methods, urged, 
as I suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is equal 
to all emergencies alone, and that man is more often injured 
than helped by the means he uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and 
the indication of growing trust in the private, seK-supplied 
powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of 
the recent philosophy ; and that it is feehng its own profound 
truth, and is reaching forward at this very hour to the happiest 
conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every 
period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial 
and protest ; much was to be resisted, much was to be got 
rid of b}^ those who were reared in the old, before they could 
begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes 
in his removal of rubbish, — and that makes the offensiveness 
of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the 
work they pretend. They lose their way ; in the assault on 
the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on 
some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of 
benefit. It is of httle moment that one or two, or twenty 
errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that 
the man be in his senses. 

The criticism and attack on institutions which we have 
witnessed has made one thing plain, that society gains, 
nothing whilst a man, not himseff renovated, attempts tO' 
renovate things around him : he has become tediously good 
in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest ; and 
hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result. 

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than 
the estabUshment, and conduct that in the best manner, than 
to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, 
without supporting it by a total regeneration. Do not be 
so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is only 
one ? Alas ! my good friend, there is no part of society or of 
life better than any other part. All our things are right and 
wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions 



216 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage 
is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social 
customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It 
is a pedantry to give such importance to them. Can we not 
play the game of life with these counters as well as with 
those ; in the institution of property, as well as out of it? 
Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, and prop- 
erty will be universality. No one gives the impression of 
superiority to the institution, which he must give who will 
reform it. It makes no difference what you say ; 3^ou must 
make me feel that you are aloof from it ; by your natural 
and supernatural advantages, do easily see to the end of it, 
— do see how man can do without it. Now all men are on 
one side. No man deserves to be heard against property. 
Only Love, only an idea, is against property, as we hold it. 

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste 
all my time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever 
I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes. 
But why come out? the street is as false as the church, and 
when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, 
I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager 
assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel 
like asking him. What right have you, sir, to your one virtue ? 
Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of 
a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst 
of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, 
alike in one place and in another, — wherever, namely, a just 
and heroic soul finds itseff, there it will do what is next at 
hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth, 
it shall abrogate that old condition, law, or school in which 
it stands, before the law of its own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the 
other defect was their reliance on Association. Doubts such 
as those I have intimated drove many good persons to agitate 
the questions of social reform. But the revolt against the 
spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate 
abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals ; and 
to do battle against numbers, they armed themselves with 
numbers, and against concert, they relied on new concert. 

Following, or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, 
of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities have already 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 217 

been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans, and many 
more in the country at large. They aim to give every member 
a share in the manual labor, to give an equal reward to labor 
and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an education 
to labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of associated 
labor and expense, to make every member rich, on the same 
amount of property, that, in separate families, would leave 
every member poor. These new associations are composed 
of men and women of superior talents and sentiments ; yet 
it may easily be questioned, whether such a community will 
draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good ; 
whether those who have energy will not prefer their chance 
of superiority and power in the world, to the humble certain- 
ties of the association; whether such a retreat does not 
promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and 
failed, rather than a field to the strong ; and whether the mem- 
bers will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each 
finds that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. 
Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand 
phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some 
catholic object : yes, excellent ; but remember that no 
society can ever be so large as one man. He in his friendship, 
in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or 
multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages 
himseK to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the 
stature of one. 

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, 
concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, 
and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. 
Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a 
phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have differed 
in opinion, and we could find no man who could make the 
truth plain, but possibly a college or an ecclesiastical council 
might. I have not been able either to persuade my brother 
or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation 
of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might 
effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for 
is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the 
Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on him. 
Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert 
is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent, 
than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make 



218 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or 
a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there 
be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then 
is concert for the first time possible, because the force which 
moves the world is a new quahty, and can never be furnished 
by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is 
the use of the concert of the false and the disunited ? There 
can be no concert in two, where there is no concert in one. 
When the individual is not individual^ but is dual ; when his 
thoughts look one way, and his actions another; when his 
faith is traversed by his habits ; when his will, enhghtened 
by reason, is warped by his sense ; when with one hand he 
rows, and with the other backs water, what concert can be? 

I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. 
The world is awaking to the idea of union, and these experi- 
ments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. 
Men will Hve and communicate, and plough, and reap, and 
govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are 
united ; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and 
respiration exactly together, four persons lift a heavy 
man from the ground by the little finger only, and without 
sense of weight. But this union must be inward, and not 
one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the 
methods they use. The union is only perfect, when all the 
uniters are isolated. It is the union of friends who live in 
different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts to 
join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished 
of his proportion ; and the stricter the union, the smaller 
and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize 
in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and 
down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonish- 
ment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no 
man spoke. Government will be adamantine without any 
governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism. 

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith 
in man, which the heart is preaching to us in these days, and 
which engages the more regard, from the consideration, that 
the speculations of one generation are the history of the next 
following. 

In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke 
of the deadness of its details. But it is open to graver 
criticism than the palsy of its members : it is a system of 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 219 

despair. The disease with which the human mind now 
labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of 
education. We do not think we can speak to divine senti- 
ments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. 
We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many 
frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and 
society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but 
of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to 
church as often as he went there, said to me, 'Hhat he liked 
to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public 
amusements go on.'^ I am afraid the remark is too honesty 
and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant^ 
*'If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it 
amused.'^ I notice too, that the ground on which* eminent 
public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear : 
'This country is filling up with thousands and millions of 
voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our 
throats.' We do not believe that any education, any system 
of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth 
of insight to a superficial mind. Having settled ourselves 
into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure allevia- 
tions, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual 
skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive 
and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy 
of limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange 
that society should be devoured by a secret melancholy^ 
which breaks through all its smiles, and all its gayety and 
gam.es ? 

But even one step further our infidelity has gone. It 
appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise men, 
whether really the happiness and probity of men are in- ' 
creased by the culture of the mind in those discipHnes to 
which we give the name of education. Unhappily, too, the 
doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried 
these methods. In their experience, the scholar was not 
raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but 
used them to selfish ends. He was a profane person, and 
became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, 
and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found 
that the intellect could be independently developed, that 
is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can 
be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A canine 



^20 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 



^ 



appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still 
be fed, but was never satisfied, and this knowledge not being 
directed on action, never took the character of substantial, 
humane truth, blessing those whom it entered. It gave the 
scholar certain powers of expression, the power of speech, 
the power of poetr^^, of literary art, but it did not bring him 
to peace, or to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it 
is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensual- 
ized by unbelief. What remedy? Life must be lived on 
a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to 
which we are always invited to ascend ; there, the whole 
aspect of things changes. I resist the scepticism of our 
education, and of our educated men. I do not believe that 
the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. 
I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, 
a permanent class of sceptics, or a class of conservatives, 
or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in 
two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman 
who importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, 
which Philip refused: the woman exclaimed, ^'I appeal' ' : 
the king, astonished, asked to whom she appealed : the woman 
replied, ^^From Philip drunk to Philip sober.'' The text will 
suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but 
in man in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I 
think, according to the good-hearted word of Plato, '' Unwill- 
ingly the soul is deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, 
or thief, no man is, but by a supposed necessity, which he 
tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets 
no man go without some visitations and holydays of a diviner 
presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning 
of any man's biography, that we are not so wedded to our 
paltry performances of every kind, but that every man has 
at intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing 
them with his belief of what he should do, that he puts him- 
self on the side of his enemies, listening gladly to what they 
say of him, and accusing himself of the same things. 

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which 
•degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles 
poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, 
the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic 
minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 221 

master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves 
of melody which the universe pours over his soul ! Before 
that gracious Infinite, out of which he drew these few strokes, 
how mean they look, though the praises of the world attend 
them. From the triumphs of his art, he turns with desire 
to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With 
silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses 
all which his hands have done, all which human hands have 
ever done. 

Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of 
virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our happier hours. 
Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are 
conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are 
most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or 
before taking their rest ; when they are sick or aged : in the 
morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been 
aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, 
they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that 
could be collected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and 
stimulating intellect, a man of great heart and mind, act on 
them, and very quickly these frozen conservators will yield 
to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, 
these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will 
begin to spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine 
• anecdote which Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when 
he was preparing to leave England, with his plan of planting 
the gospel among the American savages. "Lord Bathurst 
told me that the members of the Scriblerus club, being met 
at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who 
was also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, 
having listened to the many lively things they had to say, 
begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with 
such an astonishing and animating force of eloquence and 
enthusiasm, that they were struck dujnb, and, after some 
pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, 
' Let us set out with him immediately.' '^ Men in all ways are 
better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, 
but they know the truth for their own. It is a foolish cow- 
ardice which keeps us from trusting them, and speaking to 
them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, 
they will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily 
wish of each other ? Is it to be pleased and flattered ? No, 




222 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our 
nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts 
and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through 
the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave 
a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I 
explain so, — by this manlike love of truth, — those excesses 
and errors into which souls of great vigor, but not equal 
insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of 
all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the speed 
with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, 
and conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature : Rousseau, 
Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I could 
easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive 
their steeds so hard, in the violence of living to forget its 
illusion : they would know the worst, and tread the floors 
of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, 
Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life 
and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but 
the stake not to be so valued but that any time it could be 
held as a trifle Ught as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before 
the battle of Pharsaha, discourses with the Egyptian priest, 
concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the 
army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him those 
mysterious sources. 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, 
in the preference, namely, which each man gives to the 
society of superiors over that of his equals. All that a man 
has, will he give for right relations with his mates. All 
that he has, will he give for an erect demeanor in every 
company and on each occasion. He aims at such things 
as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, tus 
talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit him- 
self in all men's sight as a man. The consideration of an 
eminent citizen, of a. noted merchant, of a man of mark in 
his profession; naval and mihtary honor, a general's com- 
mission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of 
poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent 
merit, have this lustre for each candidate, that they enable 
him to walk erect and unashamed, in the presence of some 
persons, before whom he felt himself inferior. Having 
raised himself to this rank, having established his equality 
with class after class, of those with whom he would Hve well. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 223 

he still finds certain others, before whom he cannot possess 
himself, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat 
grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. 
Is his ambition pure ? then will his laurels and his possessions 
seem worthless : instead of avoiding these men who make 
his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him, and seek their 
society only, woo and embrace this his humihation and 
mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his 
voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in 
this presence. He is sure that the soul which gives the lie 
to all things will tell none. His constitution will not mislead 
him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and un- 
matchable in the presence of any man, if the secret oracles 
whose whisper makes the sweetness and dignity of. his life do 
here withdraw and accompany him no longer, it is tune to 
undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what 
he has acquired, and with Csesar to take in his hand the army, 
the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, ^^AU these will I relin- 
quish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile." Dear 
to us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend 
with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; 
they enlarge our life ; — but dearer are those who reject us 
as unworthy, for they add another hfe : they build a heaven 
before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply 
to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge 
us to new and unattempted performances. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior 
society, wishes to be convicted of his error, and to come to 
himself, so he wishes that the same heahng should not stop 
in his thought, but should penetrate his will or active power. 
The selfish man suffers more from liis selfishness, than he 
from whom that selfishness withholds some important bene- 
fit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher 
platform, that he may see beyond his present fear the trans- 
alpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom, may 
be broken up like fragments of ice, melted and carried away 
in the great stream of good- will. Do you ask my aid? I also 
wish to be benefactor. I wish more to be a benefactor and 
servant, than you wish to be served by me, and surely the 
greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to 
be so moved by you that I should say, 'Take me and all 
mine, and use me and mine freely to your ends ! ' for, I could 



224 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

not say it, otherwise than because a great enlargement had 
come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my 
fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on 
to our little properties, house and land, office and money, 
for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us, 
although we confess, that our being does not flow through 
them. We desire to be made great, we desire to be touched 
with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and 
make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start ob- 
jections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of 
the poor, or of the race, understand well, that it is because 
we wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. We 
wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with a 
belief that you have a secret, which it would highUest advan- 
tage us to learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, 
though it should bring us to prison, or to worse extremity. 

Nothing shall warp me from the belief, that every man 
is a lover of truth. There is no pure Ue, no pure malignity 
in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity 
is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no scepticism, 
no atheism, but that. Could it be received into conamon 
belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name 
to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man^s innocence 
and his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. 
I remember standing at the polls one day, when the anger 
of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces 
of the independent electors, and a good man at my side 
looking on the people, remarked, ^'I am satisfied that the 
largest part of these men, on either side, mean to vote right.'' 
I suppose, considerate observers looking at the masses of 
men, in their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will 
assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general 
purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The 
reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or 
his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to 
accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think 
you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not 
given him the authentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details this general 
doctrine of the latent but ever-soliciting Spirit, it would 
be easy to adduce illustration in particulars of a man's 
equality to the church, of his equality to the state, and of 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 225 

his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men^s. 
memory, that, a few years ago, the liberal churches com- 
plained, that the Calvinistic church denied to them the* 
name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession : 
a rehgious church would not complain. A religious man 
like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg is not irritated by wanting 
the sanction of the church, but the church feels the accusatioa 
of his presence and belief. 

It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets,,, 
to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance 
is our legislation. The man whose part is taken, and who 
does not wait for society in anything, has a power which, 
society cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment^ 
called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column 
of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of 
one man to the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis, 
on hearing the hves of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes 
read, '^judged them to be great men every way, excepting,, 
that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the 
laws, which to second and authorize, true virtue must abate 
very much of its original vigor.'' 

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to the state^ 
so he is equal to every other man. The disparities of power 
in men are superficial; and all frank and searching con- 
versation, in which a man lays himself open to his brother,, 
apprises each of their radical unity. When two persons 
sit and converse in a thoroughly good understanding, the 
remark is sure to be made. See how we have disputed about 
words ! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man 
knows among his friends, converse with the most command- 
ing poetic genius, I think it would appear that there was no 
inequahty such as men fancy between them ; that a perfect 
understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolished 
differences, and the poet would confess, that his creative 
imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the 
superficial one, that he could express himself, and the other- 
could not ; that his advantage was a knack, which might, 
impose on indolent men, but could not impose on lovers of 
truth; for they know the tax of talent, or, what a price 
of greatness the power of expression too often pays. I 
believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net 
amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is 



226 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. 
His want of skill in other directions has added to his fitness 
for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation 
yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hindrance operates 
as a concentration of his force. 

These and the Hke experiences intimate, that man stands 
in strict connection with a higher fact never yet manifested. 
There is power over and behind us, and we are the channels 
of its communications. We seek to say thus and so, and 
over our head some spirit sits, which contradicts what we 
say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that ; another 
self within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep 
back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and our 
words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the 
enemy, and he answers ci\dlly to us, but believes the spirit. 
We exclaim, ^There's a traitor in the house!' but at last it 
appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This 
open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, 
so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have 
never expressed the truth, and although I have never heard 
the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole 
truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your ques- 
tions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the 
question. What is the operation we call Providence? There 
lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time 
we converse, we seek to translate it into speech, but whether 
we hit, or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every dis- 
course is an approximate answer : but it is of small conse- 
quence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst 
it abides for contemplation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophes}dng heart shall make them- 
selves good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent 
men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy 
his connection with a higher life, with the man within man ; 
shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but 
forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, 
but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful, which works 
over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself 
of our success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, when we 
contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else, the 
word ^'justice" would have no meaning: they believe that 
the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 227 

would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and 
not after the design of the agent. 'Work/ it saith to man^ 
'in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and 
thou canst not escape the reward : whether thy work be 
fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be 
honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn 
a reward to the senses as well as to the thought : no matter 
how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of 
a thing well done is to have done it.^ 

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and 
to see how this high will prevails without an exception or an 
interval, he settles himself into serenity. He can already 
rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will fall where 
it is due ; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely 
through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned : we need 
not interfere to help it on, and he will learn, one day, the 
mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, 
and we need not assist the administration of the universe. 
Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the 
unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain^ 
men of standing. They are laboring harder to set the town 
right concerning themselves, and will certainly succeed. 
Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency 
of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have 
demonstrated his insufficiency to all men^s eyes. In like 
manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is 
enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only liberating 
influence. We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense 
of inferiority, — and we make self-denying ordinances, 
we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to 
jail ; it is all in vain ; only by obedience to his genius, only 
by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does 
an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the 
hand out of all the wards of the prison. 

That which befits us, imbosomed in beauty and wonder 
as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor ta 
realize our aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, 
which, when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the imagina- 
tion a higher joy than any fiction. All around us, what 
powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, 
and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurolo- 
gists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not 



228 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 

occur to them, that it is just as wonderful, that he should 
•see with them; and that is ever the difference between the 
^se and the unwise : the latter wonders at what is unusual, 
the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart 
ivhich has received so much, trust the Power by which it 
lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the 
•Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, 
secure that the future will be worthy of the past? 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

FROM ^^REPRESENTATIVE MEN'' 

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, 
than by originahty. If we require the originaUty, which 
consists in weaving, hke a spider, their web from their own 
bowels ; in finding clay, and making bricks, and building the 
house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable origi- 
nality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the 
press of knights, and the thick of events ; and, seeing what 
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful 
length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. 
The greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no 
rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he 
says everything, saying, at last, something good ; but a heart 
in unison with his time and country. There is nothing 
whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad, 
earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and 
pointed with the most determined aim which any man or 
class knows of in his times. 

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and wiU 
not have any individual great, except through the general. 
There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up 
on some fine morning, and say, *I am full of life, I will go to 
sea, and find an Antarctic continent : to-day I will square 
the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for 
man : I have a new architecture in my mind : I foresee a new 
mechanic power ' : no, but he finds himself in the river of the 
thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and neces- 
sities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes 
of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direc- 
tion in which he should go. The church has reared him 
amidst rit^s and pomps, and he carries out the advice which 

229 



230 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 



her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by he: 
chants and processions. He finds a war raging : it educates 
him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. 
He finds two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, 
from the place of production to the place of consumption, 
and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his 
materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with 
his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in. 
What an economy of power! and what a compensation for 
the shortness of life ! All is' done to his hand. The world 
has brought him thus far on his way. The hmnan race has 
gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and 
bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, 
all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. 
Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of 
the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do 
for himself : his powers would be expended in the first prep- 
arations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists 
in not being original at all ; in being altogether receptive ; in 
letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour 
to pass unobstructed through the mind. 

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people 
were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court 
took offence easily at political allusions, and attempted to 
suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic 
party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would 
suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards, 
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at 
country fairs, were the ready theatres of strolhng players. 
The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not 
hope to suppress newspapers now, — no, not by the strongest 
party, — neither then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone 
or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic, news- 
paper, caucus, lecture. Punch, and library, at the same time. 
Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own 
account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national 
interest, — by no means conspicuous, so that some great 
scholar would have thought of treating it in an English 
history, — but not a whit less considerable, because it was 
cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best 
proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly 
broke into this field ; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chap- 



i 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 231 

man, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, 
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. 

The secure possession, by the stage, of the pubhc mind, is 
of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He 
loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and 
expectation prepared. In the case of Shakspeare there is 
much more. At the time when he left Stratford, and went 
up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all dates and 
"writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced 
on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience 
-will bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of 
JuHus Csesar, and other stories out of Plutarch, which they 
never tire of ; a shelf full of English history, from the chron- 
icles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which 
men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry 
Itahan tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the London 
prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more 
or less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the 
soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer pos- 
sible to say who wrote them first. They have been the 
property of the Theatre so long, and so many rising geniuses 
have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole 
scene,^ or adding a song, that no man can any longer claim 
copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes 
to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few 
readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie 
where they are. 

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the 
mass of old pkys, waste stock, in which any experiment 
could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about 
a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. 
The rude warm blood of the hving England circulated in the 
play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to 
his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in 
popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, 
may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds 
him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice ; and, 
m^ furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at 
leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagina- 
tion. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture 
owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, 
grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the orna- 



232 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

ment of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on. 
pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm 
was projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged 
with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame 
to hold the figures ; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of 
style and treatment was reached, the prevaiHng genius of 
architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence 
in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and 
with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to 
decline ; freak, extravagance, and exhibition took the place 
of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculp- 
tor found in architecture, the perilous irritabihty of poetic 
talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which 
the people were already wonted, and which had a certain 
excellence which no single genius, however extraordinary, 
could hope to create. . Q^ 

In point ^f fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe a'v^bts 
in all directions, and was able to use whatever he found ; and 
the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's 
laborious computations in regard to the First, Second, and 
Third Parts of Henry VI., in which ^^out of 6,043 fines, 1,771 
were written by some author preceding Shakspeare; 2,373 
by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors ; and 1,899 
were entirely his own.'' And the proceeding investigation 
hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. 
Malone's sentence is an important piece of external history. 
In Henry VIIL, I think I see plainly the cropping out of the 
original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The 
first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a 
vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their 
cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene 
with Cromwell, where, instead of the metre of Shakspeare, 
whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that 
reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm, here the 
lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even 
a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through 
all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's hand, and 
some passages, as the account of the coronation, are fike auto- 
graphs. What is odd, the compUment to Queen Elizabeth 
is in the bad rhythm. 

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable 
than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 233 

augmented his resources ; and, at that day, our petulant 
demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was 
no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap 
press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate 
times, absorbs into his sphere all the hght which is anywhere 
radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of senti« 
ment, it is his fine office to bring to his people ; and he comes, 
to value his memory equally with his invention. He is 
therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been 
derived ; whether through translation, whether through tradi- 
tion, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by 
inspiration ; from whatever source, they are equally welcome 
to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. 
Other men say wise things as well as he ; only they say a good 
many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken 
wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts 
it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy 
position of Homer, perhaps ; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt 
that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and his- 
toriographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and 
dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world, — 

^'Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line. 
And the tale of Troy divine." 

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our eaii/ 
literature; and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden 
have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of 
English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. 
One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pen- 
sioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it 
seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from 
Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war 
was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and 
Statins. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provengal poets 
are his benefactors : the Romaunt of the Rose is only judi- 
cious tra:nslation from William of Lorris and John of Meun : 
Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino : the Cock and 
the Fox, from the Lais of Marie : The House of Fame, from 
the French or Italian : and poor Gower he uses as if he were 
only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his 
^ house. He steals by this apology, — that what he takes has 
no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves , 



234 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, 
that a man, having once shown himself capable of original 
writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the \^Titings of 
others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can 
entertain it;, and of him who can adequately place it. A 
certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; 
but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they 
become our own. 

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retro- 
spective. The learned member of the Legislature, at West- 
minster, or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. 
Show us the constituency^, and the now invisible channels by 
which the senator is made aware of their wishes, the crowd of 
practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or con- 
versation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and 
estimates, and it mil bereave his fine attitude and resistance 
of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel 
and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think for 
thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, 
Menu, Saadi, or jMilton, from which they drew; friends, 
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs, — all perished, — which, 
if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak 
with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any 
companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the 
writer. Is there at least in his breast a Delphi whereof to 
ask concerning smy thought or thing, whether it be veril}^ so, 
yea or nay? and to have answer, and to reply on that? All 
the debts which such a man could contract to other wit, 
w^ould never disturb his consciousness of originality : for the 
ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of 
smoke to that most private reality with which he has con- 
versed. 

It is easy to see that what is best '\;\Titten or done by genius, 
in the world, was uq man's work, but came by wide social 
labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same 
impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the 
strength and music of the English language. But it was not 
made b}^ one man, or at one time ; but centuries and churches 
brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there 
was not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired 
for its energy and pathos, is an anthology'' of the piety of ages 
and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 235 

Catholic church, — these collected, too, in long periods, from 
the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred ^vriter, 
all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect 
to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is 
composed were already in use, in the time of Christ, in the 
rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The 
nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive forms 
of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the 
legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp- 
sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries 
where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets 
its excellence by being translation on translation. There 
never was a time when there was none. All the truly idio- 
matic and national phrases are kept, and all others succes- 
sively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the 
same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of 
these books. The world takes liberties wdth w^orld-books. 
Vedas, ^Esop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, 
Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single 
men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the 
market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the 
farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its 
time with one good word ; every municipal law, every trade, 
every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is 
not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality 
of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodi- 
ment of his own. 

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the 
Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English 
drama, from the M^^steries celebrated in churches and by 
churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and 
the completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession of the 
stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, 
and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by 
the growing interest of the problem, they have left no book- 
stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old 
yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen 
was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached 
or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether 
he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second- 
best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife. 



236 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which' 
the passing age mischooses the object on which all candles 
shine, and all eyes are turned ; the care with which it registers 
every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and 
the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams ; and 
lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of another 
dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be 
remembered, — the man who carries the Saxon race in him 
by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts 
the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be 
nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. 
A popular player, — nobody suspected he was the poet of 
the human race ; and the secret was kept as faithfully from 
poets and intellectual men, -as from courtiers and frivolous 
people. Bacon who took the inventory of the human 
understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. 
Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard 
and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose 
first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought 
the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed 
himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two. : 

If it need wit to know wdt, according to the proverb, ; 
Shakspeare^s time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir j 
Henry Wotton w^as born four years after Shakspeare, and 
died twenty-three years after him ; and I find, among his 
correspondents and acquaintances, the following persons : 
Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of 
Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir 
Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, 
Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, 
Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of 
whom exists some token of his having communicated, without 
enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw, — Shak- 
speare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, 
Marlow, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of 
great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, 
there was never any such society; yet their genius failed' 
them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's 
mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. 
It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two 
centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which j 
we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible toj 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 237 

write the history of Shakspeare till now ; for he is the father 
of German literature : it was on the introduction of Shak- 
speare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his 
works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of 
German literature was most intimately connected. It was 
not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius 
is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could 
find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, 
and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon 
beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are 
educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe 
are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with 
any adequate fidelity ; but there is in all cultivated minds a 
silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, 
which, like Christianity, qualifies the period. 

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, 
advertised the missing facts, offered money for any infor- 
mation that will lead to proof; and with what result? Be- 
side some important illustration of the history of the English 
stage, to which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts 
touching the property, and dealings in regard to property, of 
the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned a 
larger share in the Blackfriars' Theatre : its wardrobe and 
other appurtenances were his : that he bought an estate in 
his native village, with his earnings, as writer and shareholder ; 
that he lived in the best house in Stratford ; was intrusted by 
his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of bor- 
rowing money, and the like ; that he was a veritable farmer. 
About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip 
Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five 
shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different 
times ; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with 
no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good- 
natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre^ 
not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors 
and managers. I admit the importance of this informa- 
tion. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to 
procure it. 

^ But whatever scraps of information concerning his condi- 
tion these researches may have rescued, they can shed no 
light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed 
magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers 



238 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth- 
place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, 
pubhcation of books, celebrity, death; and when we have 
come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears 
between it and the goddess-born ; and it seems as if, had we 
dipped at random into the ''Modern Plutarch,'' and read 
any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well. 
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter 
of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse 
all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have 
wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, 
Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. 
JBetterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate 
their lives to this genius ; him they crown, elucidate, obey, 
hni express. The genius knows them not. The recitation 
begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this 
painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations 
to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to 
see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English 
stage ; and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the 
tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no part; 
simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost, — 

''What may this mean, 
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?" 

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the 
world's dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, 
as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the 
moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of 
the green-room. Can any biography shed light on the lo- 
calities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream admits 
me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish re- 
corder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of 
that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air 
of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, ''the antres 
vast and desarts idle," of Othello's captivity, — where is the 
third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of ac- 
counts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those 
transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great 
works of art, — in the Cyclopsean architecture of Egypt and 
India; in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 239 

Italian painting; the Ballads of Spain and Scotland, — the 
Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age 
goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees 
the works, and asks in vain for a history. 

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and 
even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us ; that 
is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He 
cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his 
inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, an- 
alyzed, and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; 
and now read one of those skyey sentences, — ; aerolites, — 
which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your 
experience, but the man within the breast, has accepted as 
words of fate ; and tell me if they match ; if the former ac- 
count in any manner for the latter ; or which gives the most 
historical insight into the man. i 

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with 
Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we 
have really the information which is material, that which 
describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about 
to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to 
know. We have his recorded convictions on those questions 
which knock for answer at every heart, — on life and deaths 
on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the 
ways whereby we come at them ; on the characters of men,^ 
and the influences, occult and open, which affect their for- 
tunes ; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which 
defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and 
their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume 
of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had there 
revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, 
the lore of friendship and of love ; the confusion of sentiments 
in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most 
intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has he 
hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures 
of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities 
pleased him ; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospi- 
tality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let 
Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far 
from Shakspeare's being the least known, he is the one person, 
in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, 
of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of 



-240 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has 
he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, 
or district of man^s work, has he not remembered? What 
king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? 
What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? 
What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not 
outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the 
rudeness of his behavior ? 

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on 
Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dra- 
matic merit ; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. 
I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but 
still think it secondary. He w^as a full man, who liked to 
talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking 
vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we 
should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how 
good a dramatist he was, — and he is the best in the world. 
But it turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight as 
to withdraw some attention from the vehicle ; and he is like 
some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, 
into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into 
proverbs ; so that the occasion which gave the saint^s mean- 
ing the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of 
laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of its 
application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his 
book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: 
he wrote the text of modern life ; the text of manners : he drew 
the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in 
America : he drew the man, and described the day, and what 
is done in it; he read the hearts of men and w^omen, their 
probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the wiles of 
innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices 
slide into their contraries : he could divide the mother^s 
part from the father's part in the face of the child, or draw 
the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate : he knew the 
laws of repression which make the police of nature : and all 
the sweets and all the terrors of humaii lot lay in his mind as 
truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the 
importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama 
or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a question con- 
cerning the paper on which a king's message is written. 

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent 



P SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 241 

authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise ; 
the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle 
into Plato's brain, and think from thence ; but not into 
Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive 
faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can 
imagine it better. He was the furthest reach of subtlety 
compatible with an individual self, — the subtlest of authors, 
and only just within the possibihty of authorship. With this 
wisdom of life, is the equal endo^vment of imaginative and of 
lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with 
form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived 
under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct 
characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language 
as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into 
an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omni- 
present humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man 
of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently 
appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which 
have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all 
to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, 
consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and 
strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no impor- 
tunate topic ; but all is duly given ; no veins, no curiosities ; 
no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he ; he has no 
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, 
subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; 
he is strong, as Nature is strong, who lifts the land into moun- 
tain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats 
a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the 
other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, 
narrative, and love-songs ; a merit so incessant, that each 
reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers. 

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost 
truth of things into music and verse, makes him the type of 
the poet, and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This 
is that which throws him into natural history, as a main 
production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and 
ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without 
loss or blur ; he could paint the fine with precision, the great 
with compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and 
without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful 
execution into minute details, to a hair point ; finishes an eye- 



242 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

lash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain ; and yet 
these, hke nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the solar micro- 
scope. 

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less 
of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. 
He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre learned 
how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine ; 
and then proceeds at leisure to etch a milhon. There are 
always objects; but there was never representation. Here 
is perfect representation, at last ; and now let ^the world of 
figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the 
making of a Shakspeare ; but the possibihty of the translation 
of things into song is demonstrated. 

His lyric power hes in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, 
though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, 
are as inimitable as they ; and it is not a merit of Hues, but a 
total merit of the piece ; like the tone of voice of some incom- 
parable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any 
clause as unproducible now as a whole poem. 

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a 
beauty which tempts the ear to pause on them for their 
euphuism, yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so 
linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is 
satisfied. His means are as admirable as his ends ; every 
subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect 
some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not 
reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are run- 
ning off with him in some distant direction : he always rides. 

The finest poetry was first experience : but the thought has 
suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Culti- 
vated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing 
verses; but it is easy to read, through their poems, their 
personal history : any one acquainted with parties can name 
every figure : this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The sense 
thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not 
yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite 
over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that is 
exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakspeare. We say, 
from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows 
the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism. 

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean 
his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, — for 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 243 

beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, 
but for its grace : he deUghts in the world, in man, in woman, 
for the lovely hght that sparkles from them. Beauty, the 
spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epi- 
curus relates, that poetry hath such charms that a lover 
might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the 
true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. 
Homer hes in sunshine ; Chaucer is glad and erect ; and Saadi 
says, ^^It was rumored abroad that I was penitent ; but what 
had I to do with repentance?^' Not less sovereign and 
cheerful, — much more sovereign and cheerful, is the tone of 
Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to 
the heart of men. If he should appear in any company of 
human souls, who would not march in his troop ? He touches 
nothing that does not borrow health and longevity from his 
festal styb. 

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard 
and benefactor, when in solitude, shutting our ears to the 
reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? 
Sohtude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both 
heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds 
him to share the haKness and imperfection of humanity. 

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of 
meaning that plays over the visible world ; knew that a tree 
had another use than for apples, and corn another than for 
meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads : 
that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, 
being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their 
natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. 
Shakspeare employed them as colors to compose his picture. 
He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which 
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the 
virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power, 
— what is that which they themselves say ? He converted 
the elements, which waited on his command, into entertain- 
ments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not 
as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the 
comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, 
and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the 
municipal fire-works on a holiday night, and advertise in all 
towns, '^very superior pyrotechny this evening!'' Are the 



244 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET 

agents of nature, and the power to understand them, worth 
no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One 
remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran, — ^^The 
heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, think 
ye we have created them in jest?'' As long as the question 
is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his 
equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its 
materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What 
does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer 
Night's Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale : what signifies 
another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the 
Shakspeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial 
actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. 
Other admirable men have led fives in some sort of keeping 
with their thought ; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he 
been less, had he reached only the common measure of great 
authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave 
the fact in the twilight of human fate : but, that this man of 
men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger 
subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of 
humanity some, furlongs forward into Chaos, — that he 
should not be wise for himself, — it must even go into the 
world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and pro- 
fane life, using his genius for the public amusement. 

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and j 
Swede, beheld the same objects : they also saw through them 
that which was contained. And to what purpose? The 
beauty straightway vanished ; they read commandments, 
all-excluding mountainous duty ; an obligation, a sadness, as 
of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, J 
joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round J 
with doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind us;| 
with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; I 
and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank! 
in them. 

It must be conceded that these are half -views of half -men. ^ 
The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall' 
not trifle with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves 
with Swedenborg the mourner ; but who shall see, speak, and 
act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the 
sunshine ; right is more beautiful than private affection ; and 
love is compatible with universal wisdom. 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
WORLD 

FROM ^* REPRESENTATIVE MEN'^ 

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, 
Bonaparte is far the best known, and the most powerful; 
and owes his predominance to the fidehty with which he ex- 
presses the tone of thought* and behef , the aims of the masses 
of active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg^s thecry, 
that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles ; or, 
as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars ; 
that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lyngs ; the 
liver, of infinitely small livers ; the kidney, of little kidneys, 
etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry 
with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Na- 
poleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the 
people whom he sways are little Napoleons. 

In our society, there is a standing antagonism between the 
conservative and the democratic classes ; between those who 
have made their fortunes, and the young and the poor who 
have fortunes to make ; between the interests of dead labor — 
that is, the labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which 
labor is now entombed in money stocks, or in land and build- 
ings owned by idle capitalists — and the interests of living 
labor, which seeks to possess itself of land, and buildings, and 
money stocks. The first class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating 
innovation, and continually losing numbers by death. The 
second class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, al- 
ways outnumbering the other, and recruiting its numbers 
every hour by births. It desires to keep open every avenue 
to the competition of all, and to multiply avenues ; — the 
class of business men in America, in England, in France, and 
throughout Europe ; the class of industry and skill. Napo- 
leon is its representative. The instinct of active, brave, able 

245 



246 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out 
Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues 
and their vices ; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That 
tendency is material, pointing at a sensual success, and em- 
ploying the richest and most various means to that end ; con- 
versant with mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely 
and accurately learned and skilful, but subordinating all in- 
tellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material suc- 
cess. To be the rich man is the end. ^'God has granted," 
says the Koran, ^Ho ev^ery people a prophet in its own tongue.'^ 
Paris, and London, and New York, the spirit of commerce, of 
mone}^, and material power, were also to have their prophet ; 
and Bonaparte was qualified and sent. 

, Every one of the million readers of anecdotes, or memoirs, 
or lives of Napoleon, dehghts in the page, because he studies 
in it his own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, 
at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the 
newspapers. He is no saint, — to use his own word, ^^no 
capuchin,'' and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in 
the stre^ finds in him the qualities and powers of other men 
in the street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen, 
who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a command- 
ing position, that he could indulge all those tastes which the 
common man possesses, but is obliged to conceal and deny : 
good society, good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners, ser- 
vants without number, personal weight, the execution of 
his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all 
persons about him, the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, 
music, palaces, and conventional honors, — precisely what 
is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, — this powerful man possessed. 

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to 
the mind of the masses around him, becomes not merely rep- 
resentative, but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other 
minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, 
every good word, that was spoken in France. Dumont re- 
lates, that he sat in the gallery of the Convention, and heard 
Mirabeau make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could 
fit it with a peroration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, 
and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin 
approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mira- 
beau. Mirabeau read it, pronounced it admirable, and de- 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 247 

clared he would incorporate it into his harangue to-morrow, 
to the Assembly. ''It is impossible,'^ said Dumont, ''as, 
unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin.'' "If you 
have shown it to Lord Elgin, and to fifty persons beside, I 
shall still speak it to-morrow": and he did speak it, with 
much effect, at the next day's session. For Mirabeau, with 
his overpowering personality, felt that these things, which 
his presence inspired, were- as much his own as if he had said 
them, and that his adoption of them gave them their weight.. 
Much more absolute and centralizing was the successor to 
Mirabeau's popularity, and to much more than his predom- 
inance in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp al- ' 
most ceases to have a private speech and opinion. He is so 
largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes to be 
a bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and power, of the age 
and country. He gains the battle ; he makes the code ; he 
makes the system of weights and measures; he levels the 
Alps ; he builds the road. All distinguished engineers^ 
savans, statists, report to him: so, likewise, do all good 
heads in every kind : he adopts the best measures, sets his 
stamp on them, and not tkese alone, but on every happy and 
memorable expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, ' 
and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the 
sense of France. 

Bonaparte was the idol of common men, because he had in 
transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common 
men. There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the 
lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. 
Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he rep- 
resented, for power and wealth, — but Bonaparte, specially, 
without any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments 
which embarrass men's pursuit of these objects, he set aside. 
The sentiments were for women and children. Fontanes, 
in 1804, expressed Napoleon's own sense, when, in behalf of 
the Senate, he addressed him, — "Sire, the desire of perfec- 
tion is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind." 
The advocates of liberty, and of progress, are "ideologists"; 
— a word of contempt often in his mouth; — "Necker is an 
ideologist" : "Lafayette is an ideologist." 

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that, "if you 
would succeed, you must not be too good." It is an advan- 
tage, within certain hmits, to have renounced the dominion 



248 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

of the sentiments of piety, gratitude, and generosity ; since, 
what was an impassable bar to us, and still is to others, be- 
comes a convenient weapon for our purposes ; just as the river 
which was a formidable barrier, T\dnter transforms into the 
smoothest of roads. 

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affec- 
tions, and would help himself with his hands and his head. 
With him is no miracle, and no magic. He is a worker in 
brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in 
money, and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master- 
workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the 
sohdity and precision of natural agents. He has not lost his 
native sense and sympathy wdth things. Men give way be- 
fore such a man, as before natural events. To be sure, there 
are men enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, 
smiths, sailors, and mechanics generally ; and we know how 
real and solid such men appear in the presence of scholars 
and grammarians : but these men ordinarily lack the power 
of arrangement, and are like hands without a head. But 
Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and animal force, in- 
sight and generalization, so that men saw in him combined 
the natural and the intellectual power, as if the sea and land 
had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the land and 
sea seem to presuppose him. He came unto his own and they 
received him. This ciphering operative knows what he is 
working with, and what is the product. He knew the prop- 
erties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and 
diplomatists, and required that each should do after its kind. 

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arith- 
metic. It consisted, according to him, in having always more 
forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is at- 
tacked, or where he attacks ; and his whole talent is strained 
by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on the 
enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It is 
obvious that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly man- 
oeuvring, so as always to bring two men against one at the 
point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger 
body of men. 

The times, his constitution, and his early circumstances, 
combined to develop this pattern democrat. He had the 
virtues of his class, and the conditions for their activity. 
That common-sense, which no sooner respects any end, than 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 249 

it finds the means to effect it ; the dehght in the use of means ; 
in the choice, simpHfication, and combining of means ; the 
directness and thoroughness of his work; the prudence with 
which all was seen, and the energy with which all was done, 
make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost 
call, from its extent, the modern party. 

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, 
and so in his. Such a man was wanted, and such a man was 
born ; a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horse- 
back sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together 
without rest or food, except by snatches, and with the speed 
and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by 
any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a 
perception which did not suffer itself to be balked or misled 
by any pretences of others, or any superstition, or any heat 
or hast 3 of his own. ^^ My hand of iron,'^ he said, ^'was not 
at the extremity of my arm : it was immediately connected 
with my head." He respected the power of nature and for- 
tune, and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing 
himself, like inferior men, on his opinionativeness, and wag- 
ing war with nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in allusion 
to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, 
when he styled himself the '^ Child of Destiny." '^They 
charge me," he said, ^'with the commission of great crimes : 
men of my stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing has been 
more simple than my elevation : ^t is in vain to ascribe it to 
intrigue or crime : it was owing to the peculiarity of the times, 
and to my reputation of having fought well against the en- 
emies of my country. I have always marched with the opin- 
ion of great- masses, and with events. Of what use, then, 
would crimes be to me ? " Again he said, speaking of his son : 
'^My son cannot replace me: I could not replace myself. 
I am the creature of circumstances." 

He had a directness of action never before combined with 
so much comprehension. He is a realist terrific to all talkers, 
and confused truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the 
matter hinges, throws himself on the precise point of resist- 
ance, and slights all other considerations. He is strong in 
the right manner, namely, by insight. He never blundered 
into victory, but won his battles in his head, before he won 
them on the field. His principal means are in himself. He 
asks counsel of no other. In 1796, he writes to the Direc- 



250 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

tory: ^'I have conducted the campaign without consulting 
any one. I should have done no good, if I had been under the 
necessity of conforming to the notions of another person. I 
have gained some advantages over superior forces, and when 
totally destitute of everything, because, in the persuasion 
that your confidence was reposed in me, my actions were as 
prompt as my thoughts.^' 

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings 
and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, 
for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike 
for bread ; and the king and his ministers, not knowing what 
to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood 
his business. Here was a man who, in each moment and 
emergency, knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort 
and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citi- 
zens. Few men have any next ; they live from hand to mouth 
without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and, after 
each action, wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon 
had been the first man of the world, if his ends had been 
purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor 
by the extraordinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure, 
self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing everything to his 
aim, — money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, to 
his aim ; not misled, like common adventurers, by the splen- 
dor of his own means . ^ ^ Incidents ought not to govern policy, ' ' 
he said, ''but policy, incidents. ^^ ''To be hurried away by 
every event, is to have no political system at all.^' His vic- 
tories were only so many doors, and he never for a moment 
lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of the 
present circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew to 
his mark. He would shorten a straight line to come at hi3 
object. Horrible anecdotes may, no doubt, be collected 
from his history, of the price at which he bought his successes ; 
but he must not therefore be set down as cruel ; but only as 
one who knew no impediment to his will ; not bloodthirsty, 
not cruel, — but woe to what thing or person stood in his 
way ! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood, — and 
pitiless. He saw only the object : the obstacle must give 
way. "Sire, General Clarke cannot combine with General 
Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery.^' — 
"Let him carry the battery." — "Sire, every regiment that 
approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed: Sire, what 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 251 

orders?'' — ^^ Forward, forward !'' Seruzier, a colonel of 
artillery, gives, in his Military Memoirs, the following sketch 
of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz : ''At the moment 
in which the Russian army was making its retreat, painfully, 
but in good order, on the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napo- 
leon came riding at full speed toward the artillery. 'You 
are losing time,' he cried; 'fire upon those masses; they 
must be ingulfed : fire upon the ice ! ' The order remained 
unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers and 
myself were placed on the slope of a hill to produce the effect : 
their balls and mine rolled upon the ice, without breaking 
it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating light 
howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the heavy pro- 
jectiles produced the desired effect. My method was im- 
mediately followed by the adjoining batteries, and in less 
than no time we buried'' some "thousands of Russians and 
Austrians under the waters of the lake." 

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to 
vanish. "There shall be no Alps," he said; and he built 
his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest 
precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in 
France. He laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. 
Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might 
and main.* He put out all his strength. He risked everything, 
and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor 
troops, nor generals, nor himself. 

We like to see everything do its office after its kind, whether 
it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake; and, if fighting be the 
best mode of adjusting national differences (as large major- 
ities of men seem to agree), certainly Bonaparte was right in 
making it thorough. "The grand principle of war," he said, 
"was, that an army ought always to be ready, by day and 
by night, and at all hours, to make all the resistance it is ca- 
pable of making." He never economized his ammunition, but, 
on a hostile position, rained a torrent of iron, — shells, balls, 
grape-shot, — to annihilate all defence. On any point pf 
resistance, he concentrated squadron on squadron in over- 
whelming numbers, until it was svv^ept out of existence. To 
a regiment of horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before 
the battle of Jena, Napoleon said: "My lads, you must not 
fear death; when soldiers brave death, they drive him into 
the enemy's ranks." In the fury of assault, he no more spared 



252 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

himself. He went to the edge of his possibiHty. It is plain 
that in Italy he did what he could, and all that he could. He 
came, several times, within an inch of ruin ; and his own per- 
son was all but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Areola. 
The Austrians were between him and his troops, in the melee, 
and he was brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, 
and at other places, he was on the point of being taken pris- 
oner. He fought sixty battles. He had never enough. 
Each victory was a new weapon. ^^My power would fail, 
were I not to support it by new achievements. Conquest 
has made m.e what I am, and conquest must maintain me.^' 
He felt, with every wise man, that as much life is needed for 
conservation, as for creation. We are always in peril, always 
in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction, and only to 
be saved by invention and courage. 

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest pru- 
dence and punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he 
was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very at- 
tack was never the inspiration of courage, but the re&ult of 
calculation. His idea of the best defence consists in being 
still the attacking party. '*My ambition,'^ he says, "was 
great, but was of a cold nature.^ ^ In one of his conversations 
with Las Cases, he remarked, "As to moral courage, I have 
rarely met with the two-o'clock-in-the-morning kind : I mean 
unprepared courage, that which is necessarj^ on an unexpected 
occasion ; and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, 
leaves full freedom of judgment and decision'^ : and he did 
not hesitate to declare that he was himself eminently endowed 
with this "two-o'clock-in-the~morning courage, and that he 
had met with few persons equal to himself in this respect.'' 

Everything depended on the nicety of his combinations, 
and the stars were not more punctual than his arithmetic. 
His personal attention descended to the smallest particulars. 
^^At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight 
hundred horse, and with these he separated the six thousand 
Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian 
cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off, and required a 
quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of action ; and I have 
observed, that it is always these quarters of an hour that de- 
cide the fate of a battle.'' "Before he fought a battle, Bona- 
parte thought little about \^hat he should do in case of success, 
but a great deal about what he should do in case of a reverse 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 253 

of fortune/^ The same prudence and good sense mark all 
his behavior. His instructions to his secretary at the Tuiler- 
ies are worth remembering. ^^ During the night, enter my 
chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when 
you have any good news to communicate ; with that there 
is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me in- 
stantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost.'^ It was 
a whimsical economy of the same kind which dictated his 
practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome 
correspondence. He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters 
unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfac- 
tion how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed 
of itseK, and no longer required an answer. His achievement 
of business was immense, and enlarges the known powers of 
man. There have been many working kings, from Ulysses 
to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe of 
this man's performance. 

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of 
having been born to a private and humble fortune. In his 
later days, he had the weakness of wishing to add to his crowns 
and badges the prescription of aristocracy; but he knew his 
debt to his austere education, and made no secret of his con- 
tempt for the born kings, and for ^'the hereditary asses,'' 
as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said that, '^in their 
exile, they have learned nothing and forgot nothing." Bona- 
parte had passed through all the degrees of military service, 
but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the 
key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the 
information and justness of measurement of the middle class. 
Those who had to deal with him, found that he was not to 
be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. 
This appears in all parts of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. 
When the expenses of the empress, of his household, of his 
palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined 
the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and 
errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums. 

His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he directed, 
he owed to the representative character which clothed him. 
He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe ; and 
he exists as captain and king, only as far as the revolution, 
or the interest of the industrious masses, found an organ and 
a leader in him. In the social interests, he knew the meaning 



254 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

and value of labor, and threw himseK naturally on that side. 
I like an incident mentioned by one of his biographers at 
St. Helena. ^'When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some 
servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and 
Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry tone, to 
keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying, 'Respect the bur- 
den. Madam. ^ ^' In the time of the empire, he directed 
attention to the improvement and embellishment of the mar- 
kets of the capital. ''The market-place," he said, "is the 
Louvre of the common people." The principal works that 
have survived him are his magnificent roads. He filled the 
troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and companion- 
ship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his 
court never permitted between the officers and himself. They 
performed, under his eye, that which no others could do. 
The best document of his relation to his troops is the order 
of the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which 
Napoleon promises the troops that he will keep his person 
out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse 
of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the 
eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army 
to their leader. 

But though there is in particulars this identity between 
Napoleon and the mass of the people, his real strength lay 
in their conviction that he was their representative in his 
genius and aims, not only when he courted, but when he con- 
trolled, and even when he decimated them by his conscrip- 
tions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to 
philosophize on liberty and equality ; and, when allusion was 
made to the precious blood of centuries, which was spilled 
by the killing of the Due d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither 
is my blood ditch-water." The people felt that no longer 
the throne was occupied, and the land sucked of its nourish- 
ment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all com- 
munity with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas 
and superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. In- 
stead of that vampyre, a man of themselves held, in the Tuil- 
eries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening, of course, 
to them and their children, all places of power and trust. 
The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the means 
and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a day of 
expansion and demand was come. A market for all the 



^ 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 255 

powers and productions of man was opened ; brilliant prizes 
glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron- 
bound, feudal France was changed into a young Ohio or New 
York; and those who smarted under the immediate rigors 
of the new monarch, pardoned them, as the necessary sever- 
ities of the military system which had driven out the oppressor. 
And even when the majority of the people had begun to ask, 
whether they had really gained anything under the exhaust- 
ing levies of men and money of the new master, — the whole 
talent of the countrj^, in every rank and kindred, took his 
part, and defended him as its natural patron. In 1814, when 
advised to rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those 
around him: ^^ Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, 
my only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs.^' 

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity 
of his position required a hospitality to every sort of talent, 
and its appointment to trusts ; and his feeling went along 
with this policy. Like every superior person, he undoubtedly 
felt a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his 
power with other masters, and an impatience of fools and 
underlings. In Italy, he sought for men, and found none. 
^'Good God !'' he said, ^'how rare men are ! There are eight- 
een millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two, 
— Dandolo and Melzi.'^ In later years, with larger experience, 
his respect for mankind was not increased. In a moment 
of bitterness, he said, to one of his oldest friends: ^'Men 
deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have 
only to put some gold lace on the coat of my virtuous repub- 
licans, and they immediately become just what I wish them.'' 
This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of 
respect to those able persons who commanded his regard, 
not only when he found them friends and coadjutors, but 
also when they resisted his will. He could not confound Fox 
and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette, and Bernadotte, ' with the dan- 
glers of his court ; and, in spite of the detraction which his sys- 
tematic egotism dictated towards the great captains who con- 
quered with and for him, ample acknowledgments are made 
by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, 
Ney, and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron, and the 
founder of their fortunes, as when he said, ^^I made my gen- 
erals out of mud,'' he could not hide his satisfaction in receiv- 
ing from them a seconding and support commensurate with 




256 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign, 
he was so much impressed by the courage and resources of 
Marshal Ney, that he said, ^'I have two hundfed milUons in 
my coffers, and I would give them all for Ney/^ The char- 
acters which he has drawn of several of his marshals are dis- 
criminating, and, though they did not content the insatiable 
vanity of French officers, are, no doubt, substantially just. 
And, in fact, every species of merit was sought and advanced 
under his government. ^^I know,'' he said, ^Hhe depth and 
draught of water of every one of my generals.'' Natural 
power was sure to be well received at his court. Seventeen 
men, in his time, were raised from common soldiers to the 
rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of 
his Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not 
to family connection. ^^When soldiers have been baptized 
in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one rank in my eyes." 
When a natural king becomes a titular king, everybody 
is pleased and satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong 
populace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horse-boy 
and powder-monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon, as 
flesh of his flesh, and the creature of his party; but there 
is something in the success of grand talent which enlists a 
universal sympathy. For, in the prevalence of sense and 
spirit over stupidity and malversation, all reasonable men 
have an interest ; and, as intellectual beings, we feel the air 
purified by the electric shock, when material force is over- 
thrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we are removed 
out of the reach of local and accidental partialities, man feels 
that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories; 
this strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals 
to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of 
human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us. This 
capacious head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains 
of affairs, and animating such multitudes of agents ; this eye, 
which looked through Europe ; this prompt invention ; this 
inexhaustible resource ; — what events ! what romantic pic- 
tures ! what strange situations ! — when spying the Alps, 
by a sunset in the Sicilian sea ; drawing up his army for battle, 
in sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, ^'From 
the tops of those pyramids, forty centuries look down on 
you" ; fording the Red Sea; wading in the guK of the Isth- 
mus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 257 

agitated him. '^Had Acre fallen, I should have changed the 
face of the world /^ His army, on the night of the battle 
of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration 
as Emperor, presented him with a bouquet of forty standards 
taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure 
he took in making these contrasts glaring ; as, when he pleased 
himself with making kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, 
at Paris, and at Erfurt. 

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecision, and in- 
dolence of men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this 
strong and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard, and 
showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force 
of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees ; namely, by 
punctuality, by personal attention, by courage, and thorough- 
ness. "The Austrians,'' he said, ''do not know the value 
of time.^' I should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model 
of prudence. His power does not consist in any wild or ex- 
travagant force ; in any enthusiasm, like Mahomet's ; or 
singular power of persuasion ; but in the exercise of common- 
sense on each emergency, instead of abiding by rules and cus- 
toms. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always 
teaches, — that there is always room for it. To what heaps 
of cowardly doubts is not that man's life an answer. When 
he appeared, it was the belief of all military men that there 
could be nothing new in war ; as it is the belief of men to-day, 
that nothing new can be undertaken in politics, or in church, 
or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our social manners 
and customs ; and as it is, at all times, the belief of society 
that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than 
society ; and, moreover, knew that he knew better. I think 
all men know better than they do ; know that the institutions 
we so volubly commend are go-carts and bawbles ; but they 
dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on 
his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people's. 
The world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody's 
novelties, — made infinite objection ; mustered all the im- 
pediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. 
"What creates great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profes- 
sion of the land-commander, is the necessity of feeding so 
many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided 
by the commissaries, he will never stir, and all his expeditions 
will fail." An example of his common-sense is what he says 



LD I 



258 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one 
repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. 
'^The winter," says Napoleon, ''is not the most unfavorable 
season for the passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then 
firm, ^.he weather settled, and there is nothing to fear from 
avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in 
the Alps. On those high mountains, there are often very 
fine days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme calmness 
in the air.'' Read his account, too, of the way in which battles 
are gained. ''In all battles, a moment occurs, when the 
bravest troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel 
inclined to run. That terror proceeds from a want of con- 
fidence in their own courage ; and it only requires a slight 1 
opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence to them. The i 
art is to give rise to the opportunity, and to invent the pre- 
tence. At Areola, I won the battle with twenty-five horse- 
men. I seized that moment of lassitude, gave every man a 
trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. You see 
that two armies are two bodies which meet, and endeavor 
to frighten each other : a moment of panic occurs, and that 
moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has 
been present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment 
without difficulty : it is as easy as casting up an addition.'' 

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts I 
a capacity for speculation on general topics. He delighted f 
in running through the range of practical, of literary, and of 
abstract questions. His opinion is always original, and to 
the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he liked, after dinner, | 
to fix on three or four persons to support a proposition, and « 
as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discus- 
sions turned on questions of religion, the different kinds of 
governm^ent, and the art of war. One day, he asked, whether 
the planets were inhabited? On another, what was the age 
of the world ? Then he proposed to consider the probability 
of the destruction of the globe, either by water or by fire : 
at another time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, and 
the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond of talking 
of religion. In 1806, he conversed with Fournier, Bishop of 
Montpellier, on matters of theology. There were two points I 
on which they could not agree, viz., that of hell, and that of I 
salvation out of the pale of the church. The Emperor told 
Josephine, that he disputed like a devil on these two points, 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 259 

on which the Bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers 
he readily yielded all that was proved against religion as the 
work of men and time ; but he would not hear of materialism. 
One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism, Bona- 
parte pointed to the stars, and said, i^You may talk as long 
as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?'' He de- 
lighted in the conversation of men of science, particularly 
of Monge and Berthollet ; but the men of letters he slighted ; 
"they were manufacturers of phrases." Of medicine, too, 
he was fond of talking, and with those of its practitioners 
whom he most esteemed, — with Corvisart at Paris, and with 
Antonomarchi at St. Helena. "Believe me,'' he said to the 
last, "we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a 
fortress which neither you nor I know anything about. Why 
throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means 
are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Cor- 
visart candidly agreed with me, that all your filthy mixtures 
are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain 
prescriptions, the results of which taken collectively, are 
more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanli- 
ness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia." 

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General 
Gourgaud, at St. Helena, have great value, after all the deduc- 
tion that, it seems, is to be made from them, on account of his 
known disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of strength 
and conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear narra- 
tive of his battles; good as C2esar's; his good-natured and 
sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his 
other antagonists, and his own equality as a writer to his 
varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Cam- 
paign in Egypt. 

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of 
leisure, either in the camp or the palace. Napoleon appears 
as a man of genius, directing on abstract questions the native 
appetite for truth and the impatience of words he was wont 
to show in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a 
romance, a bon-mot, as well as a stratagem in a campaign. 
He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim- 
lighted apartment, by the terrors of a fiction, to which his 
voice and dramatic power lent every addition. 

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class 
of modern society ; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, 



260 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world, 
aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of 
prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, 
the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the 
subverter of monopoly and abiise. Of course, the rich and 
aristocratic did not like him. England, the centre of capi- 
tal, and Rome and Austria, centres of tradition and geneal- 
ogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull and con- 
servative classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old 
women of the Roman conclave, — who in their despair took 
hold of anything, and would cling to red-hot iron, — the 
vain attempts of statists to amuse and deceive him, of the Em- 
peror of Austria to bribe him ; and the instinct of the young, 
ardent, and active men, everywhere, which pointed him out 
as the giant of the middle class, make his history bright and 
commanding. He had the virtues of the masses of his con- 
stituents : he had also their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant 
picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which 
we discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous, 
and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the sentiments ; 
and it is inevitable that we should find the same fact in the 
history of this champion, who proposed to himself simply a 
brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple concerning 
the means. 

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. 
The highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and 
population of the world, — he has not the merit of common 
truth and honesty. He is unjust to his generals ; egotistic, 
and monopolizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great 
actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte; intriguing to 
involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order 
to drive him to a distance from Paris, because the familiarity 
of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is 
a boundless liar. The official paper, his Moniteurs, and all 
his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to be 
believed ; and worse, — he sat, in his premature old age, in 
his lonely island, coldly falsifying facts, and dates, and char- 
acters, and giving to history a theatrical eclat. Like all 
Frenchmen, he has a passion for stage effect. Every action 
that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. 
His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality 
of the soul, are all French. '^I must dazzle and astonish. 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 261 

c 

If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not 
last three days/^ To make a great noise is his favorite de- 
sign. ^'A great reputation is a great noise; the more there 
is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monu- 
ments, nations, all fall ; but the noise continues, and resounds 
in after ages.'^ His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. 
His theory of influence is not flattering. ^^ There are two 
levers for moving men, — interest and fear. Love is a silly 
infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I 
love nobody. I do not even love my brothers : perhaps 
Joseph, a little, from habit, and because he is my elder ; and 
Duroc, I love him too ; but why ? — because his character 
pleases me : he is stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow 
never shed a tear. For my part, I know very well that I 
have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, 
Tmay have as many pretended friends as I please. Leave 
sensibility to women : but men should be firm in heart and 
purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and 
government.^^ He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would 
steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest 
dictated. He had no generosity; but mere vulgar hatred: 
he was intensely selfish : he was perfidious : he cheated at 
cards: he was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and 
delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed his hands with 
joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence con- 
cerning the men and women about him, boasting that ^^he 
knew everything'^; and interfered with the cutting the dresses 
% of the women ; and listened after the hurrahs and the com- 
pliments of the street, incognito. His manners were coarse. 
He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit 
of pulling their ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was 
in good-humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, 
and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. 
It does not appear that he listened at keyholes, or, at least, 
that he was caught at it. In short, when you have penetrated 
through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not 
dealing with a gentleman, at last ; but with an impostor and 
a rogue : and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin^ 
or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. 

In describing the two parties into which modern society 
divides itself, — the democrat and the conservative, — I 



262 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 

said, Bonaparte represents the democrat, or the party of 
men of business, against the stationary or conservative party. 
I omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, 
namely, that these two parties differ only as young and old. 
The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative 
is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, 
and gone to seed, — because both parties stand on the one 
ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors 
to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to 
represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its 
age ; yes, and with poetic justice, its fate, in his own. The 
counter-revolution, the counter-party, still waits for its organ 
and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and 
universal aims. 

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable condi- 
tions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never 
was such a leader so endowed, and so weaponed ; never leader 
found such aids and followers. And what was the result of 
this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned 
cities, squandered* treasures, immolated millions of men, of 
this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed 
away, like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He 
left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and 
the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The 
attempt was, in principle, suicidal. France served him with 
life, and limb, and estate, as long as it could identify its in- 
terest with him; but when men saw that after victory was 
another war ; after the destruction of armies, new conscrip- 
tions ; and they who had toiled so desperately were never 
nearer to the reward, — they could not spend what they had 
earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in their cha- 
teaux, — they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing 
egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the tor- 
pedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who 
takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles 
of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers ; and 
the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he 
paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbitant egotist 
narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and exis- 
tence of those who served him ; and the universal cry of 
France, and of Europe, in 1814, was, ^^enough of him'': 
^^assez de Bonaparte.'' 



I 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 263 

It was not Bonaparte ^s fault. He did all that in him lay, 
to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the na- 
ture of things, the eternal law of the man and the world, which 
balked and ruined him; and the result, in a million experi- 
ments, will be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes 
or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. 
The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Na- 
poleon. As long as our civilization is essentially one of prop- 
erty, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. 
Our riches will leave us sick ; there will be bitterness in our 
laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that 
good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and 
which serves all men. 



CHAPTERS FROM ^^ ENGLISH TRAITS'' 

ABILITY 

The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians. 
History does not allow us to fix the limits of the application, 
of these names with any accuracy; but from the residence 
of a portion of these people in France, and from some effect, 
of that powerful soil on their blood and manners, the Normanl 
has come popularly to represent in England the aristocra-' 
tic, and the Saxon the democratic principle. And though, 
I doubt not, the nobles are of both tribes, and the workers 
of both, yet we are forced to use the names a little mythically, 
one to represent the worker, and the other the enjoyer. 

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the 
dominant races tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician, 
the Celt, and the Goth had already got in. The Roman 
came, but in the very day when his fortune culminated. 
He looked in the eyes of a new people that was to supplant 
his own. He disembarked his legions, erected his camps 
and towers, — presently he heard bad news from Italy, and 
worse and worse, every year : at last, he made a handsome 
compliment of roads and walls, and departed. But the Saxon 
seriously settled in the land, builded, tilled, fished, and traded, 
with German truth and adhesiveness. The Dane came, and 
divided with him. Last of all, the Norman, or French- 
Dane, arrived, and formally conquered, harried, and ruled 
the kingdom. A century later, it came out, that the Saxon 
had the most bottom and longevity, had managed to make 
the victor speak the language and accept the law and usage 
of the victim ; forced the baron to dictate Saxon terms to 
Norman kings ; and, step by step, got all the essential 
securities of civil Uberty invented and confirmed. The genius 
of the race and the genius of the place conspired to this effect. 

264 



I 



CHAPTERS FROM /'ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 265 

The island is lucrative to free labor, but not worth possession 
on other terms. The race was so intellectual, that a feudal 
or military tenure could not last longer than the war. The 
power of the Saxon-Danes, so thoroughly beaten in the war,, 
that the name of Enghsh and villein were synonymous, yet 
so vivacious as to extort charters from the kings, stood on 
the strong personality of these people. Sense and economy 
must rule in a world which is made of sense and economy, 
and the banker, with his seven per cent, drives the earl out of 
his castle. A nobihty of soldiers cannot keep down a com- 
monalty of shrewd scientific persons. What signifies a. 
pedigree of a hundred links, against a cotton-spinner with, 
steam in his mill ; or, against a company of broad-shouldered 
Liverpool merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunei are 
contriving locomotives and a tubular bridge? 

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have 
the taste for toil, a distaste for pleasure or repose, and the 
telescopic appreciation of distant gain. They are the 
wealth-makers, — and by dint of mental faculty which has 
its own conditions. The Saxon works after liking, or, only 
for himself ; and to set him at work, and to begin to draw 
his monstrous values out of barren Britain, all dishonor, 
fret, and barrier must be removed, and then his energies 
begin to play. 

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls, 
— a kind of goblin men, with vast power of work and skilful 
production, — divine stevedores, carpenters, reapers, smiths, 
and masons, swift to reward every kindness done them, with, 
gifts of gold and silver. In all English history, this dream 
comes to pass. Certain Trolls or working brains, under the 
names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton, Camden, Drake, 
Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, Brindley, Watt, Wedg- 
wood, dwell in the trollmounts of Britain, and turn the 
sweat of their face to power and renown. 

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed on 
this spell-bound island with impunity. The enchantments 
of barren shingle and rough weather transformed every 
adventurer into a laborer. Each vagabond that arrived 
bent his neck to the yoke of gain, or found the air too tense 
for him. The strong survived, the weaker went to the 
ground. Even the pleasure-hunters and sots of England 
are of a tougher texture. A hard temperament had been 



266 CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS' 






formed by Saxon and Saxon-Dane, and such of these Frenc' 
or Normans as could reach it, were naturalized in e very- 
sense. 

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in England 
must be looked at as growths or irresistible offshoots of the 
expanding mind of the race. A man of that brain thinks 
and acts thus; and his neighbor, being afflicted with the 
same kind of brain, though he is rich, and called a baron, 
or a duke, thinks the same thing, and is ready to allow the 
justice of the thought and act in his retainer or tenant, 
though sorely against his baronial or ducal will. 

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of 
mastiffs, so fierce, that w^hen their teeth were set, you must 
cut their heads off to part them. The man was like his dog; 
The people have that nervous bihous temperament, which 
is known by medical men to resist every means emplo^^ed 
to make its possessor subservient to the will of others. The 
English game is main force to main force, the planting of 
foot to foot, fair play and open field, — a rough tug without 
trick or dodging, till one or both come to pieces. King 
Ethelwald spoke the language of his race, when he planted 
himseK at Wimborne, and said, ^he would do one of two 
things, or there live, or there lie.' They hate craft and 
subtlety. They neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate ; 
and, when they have pounded each other to a poultice, they 
will shake hands and be friends for the remainder of their 
lives. 

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at country 
fairs, at the hustings, and in parliament. No artifice, no 
breach of truth and plain dealing, — not so much as secret 
ballot, is suffered in the island. In parhament, the tactics 
of the opposition is to resist every step of the government 
by a pitiless attack ; and in a bargain, no prospect of advan- 
tage is so dear to the merchant as the thought of being 
tricked is mortifying. 

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and James, who 
won the sea-fight of Scanderoon, was a model Englishman 
in his day. ''His person was handsome and gigantic, he had 
so graceful elocution and noble address, that, had he been 
dropt out of the clouds in any part of the world, he would 
have made himself respected : he was skilled in six tongues, 
and master of arts and arms.'' Sir Kenelm wrote a book, 



i^HAPTERS FROM ^^ ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 267 

''Of Bodies and of Souls/ ^ in which he propounds, that 
'^ syllogisms do breed or rather are all the variety of man's 
life. They are the steps by which we walk in all our busi- 
nesses. Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such 
chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving from this work, 
he doth as deficient from the nature of man : and, if he do 
aught beyond this, by breaking out into divers sorts of 
exterior actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked 
sequel of simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, the 
bounds, and the model of it.'' 

There spoke the genius of the English people. There 
is a necessity on them to be logical. They would hardly 
greet the good that did not logically fall, — as if it excluded 
their own merit, or shook their understandings. They are 
jealous of minds that have much facility of association, from 
an instinctive fear that the seeing many relations to their 
thought might impair this serial continuity and lucrative 
concentration. They are impatient of genius, or of minds 
addicted to contemplation, and cannot conceal their con- 
tempt for sallies of thought, however lawful, whose steps 
they cannot count by their wonted rule. Neither do they 
reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism. For they 
have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings 
salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, 
carpenters, and chemists, following the sequence of nature, 
and one on which words make no impression. Their mind 
is not dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to 
results. They love men, who, like Samuel Johnson, a doctor 
in the schools, would jump out of his syllogism the instant 
his major proposition was in danger, to save that, at all 
hazards. Their practical vision is spacious, and they can 
hold many threads without entangling them. All the steps 
they orderly take ; but with the high logic of never confound- 
ing the minor and major proposition; keeping their eye on 
their aim, in all the complicity and delay incident to the 
several series of means they employ. There is room in their 
minds for this and that, — a science of degrees. In the 
courts, the independence of the judges and the loyalty of the 
suitors are equally excellent. In Parliament, they have 
hit on that capital invention of freedom, a constitutional 
opposition. And when courts and Parliament are both deaf, 
the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon 



268 CHAPTERS FROM '' ENGLISH TRAITS^' 

of defence from year to year is the obstinate reproduction 
of the grievance, with calculations and estimates. But, 
meantime, he is drawing numbers and money to his opinion, 
resolved that if all remedy fails, right of revolution is at the 
bottom of his charter-box. They are bound to see their 
measure carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat. 

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice, 
enters, not so apparent in other races, — a belief in th< 
existence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play 
There is on every question an appeal from the assertion of the 
parties to the proof of what is asserted. They kiss the dust 
before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer 
in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings, — the universe 
of Englishmen will suspend their judgment until the trial 
can be had. They are not to be led by a phrase, they want 
a working plan, a working machine, a working constitution, 
and will sit out the trial, and abide by the issue, and reject 
all preconceived theories. In politics they put blunt ques- 
tions, which must be answered; who is to pay the taxes? 
what will you do for trade? what for corn? what for the 
spinner ? 

This singular fairness and its results strike the French 
with surprise. Philip de Commines says: ''Now, in my 
opinion, among all the sovereignties I know in the world, 
that in which the public good is best attended to, and the 
least violence exercised on the people, is that of England.^' 
Life is safe, and personal rights ; and what is freedom, without 
security? whilst, in France, 'fraternity,^ 'equality,' and 
'indivisible unity' are names for assassination. Montes- 
quieu said: "England is the freest country in the world. 
If a man in England had as many enemies as hairs on his 
head, no harm would happen to him." 

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their 
realistic logic or coupling of means to ends, have given them 
the leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu said, 
"No people have true common-sense but those who are born 
in England.'' This common-sense is a perception of all the 
conditions of our earthly existence, of laws that can be stated, 
and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only 
by practice, in which allowance for friction is made. They 
are impious in their scepticism of theory, and in high depart- 
ments they are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional 



i 



CHAPTERS FROM '^ ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 269 

surrender to facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends, 
are as admirable as with ants and bees. 

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love 
the lever, the screw, and pulley, the Flanders draught- 
horse, the waterfall, wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and 
the wind to bear their freight-ships. More than the diamond! 
Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown-jewels, they 
prize that dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles 
turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis 
is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are- 
steam and galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts,, 
but adroit at the coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics,, 
but the best iron-masters, colliers, wool-combers, and tanners 
in Europe. They apply themselves to agriculture, to drain- 
ing, to resisting encroachments of sea, wind, travellings 
sands, cold and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufacture of 
indispensable staples, — salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass,, 
pottery, and brick, — to bees and silk-worms ; and by their- 
steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits 
down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was wool on a 
sheep's back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on 
venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mushrooms, and. 
pineapples, all the growth of his estate. They are neat 
husbands for ordering all their tools pertaining to house^ 
and field. All are well kept. There is no want and no^ 
waste. They study use and fitness in their building, irr 
the order of their dwellings, and in their dress. The French- 
man invented the ruffle, the Englishman added the shirt. 
The Englishman wears a sensible coat buttoned to the chin, 
of rough but solid and lasting texture. If he is a lord, he 
dresses a little worse than a commoner. They have diffused 
the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes, and coats through 
Europe. They think him the best dressed man, whose 
dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember 
to describe it. 

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts and 
manufactures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its shape, 
thought and long experience of workmen. They put the 
expense in the right place, as, in their sea-steamers, in the 
solidity of the machinery and the strength of the boat. The 
admirable equipment of their arctic ships carries London 
to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts, warm and venti- 



270 CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS'' . 

late houses. And they have impressed their directness and 
practical habit on modern civilization. 

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks who 
ought not to break ; and, that, if he do not make trade every- 
thing, it will make him nothing; and acts on this belief. 
The spirit of s^^stem, attention to details, and the subordi- 
nation of details, or, the not driving things too finely (which 
is charged on the Germans), constitute that despatch of 
business which makes the mercantile power of England. 

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of 
the opinion of Ci^dlis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus 
reports as holding ^Hhat the gods are on the side of the 
strongest'^; — a sentence which Bonaparte unconsciously 
translated, when he said, ^Hhat he had noticed, that Pro^d- 
dence always favored the heaviest battalion." Their mili- 
tary science propounds that if the weight of the advancing 
column is greater than that of the resisting, the latter is 
destroyed. Therefore Wellington, when he came to the 
army in Spain, had every man weighed, first T\dth accoutre- 
ments, and then without; believing that the force of an 
army depended on the weight and power of the individual 
soldiers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told the 
House of Commons, that more care is taken of the health 
and comfort of English troops than of any other troops in 
the world; and that hence the English can put more men 
into the ranks, on the day of action, on the field of battle, 
than any other army. Before the bombardment of the 
Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day after day, 
himself in the boats, on the exhausting ser\'ice of sounding 
the channel. Clerk of Eldin's celebrated manceu\Te of 
breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson's feat of doubling , 
or stationing his ships one on the outer bow, and another on 
the outer quarter of each of the enemy's, were only trans- 
lations into naval tactics of Bonaparte's rule of concentration. 
Lord Collingw^ood was accustomed to tell his men, that, if 
they could fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, 
no vessel could resist them; and, from constant practice, 
they came to do it in three minutes and a half. 

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely 
most on the simplest means ; and do not like ponderous and 
difficult tactics, but delight to bring the affair hand to hand, 
where the victory lies with the strength, courage, and endurance 



CHAPTERS FROM ''ENGLISH TRAITS'' 271 

of the individual combatants. They adopt every improve- 
ment in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they fundamentally 
believe that the best stratagem in naval war is to lay your 
ship close alongside of the enemy's ship, and bring all your 
guns to bear on him, until you or he go to the bottom. This 
is the old fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither 
in nor out of England. 

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sentiment, 
and never any whim that they will shed their blood for ; but 
usually property, and right measured by property, that 
breeds revolution. They have no Indian taste for a toma- 
hawk-dance, no French taste for a badge or a proclamation. 
The Englishman is peaceably minding his business and earn- 
ing his day's wages. But if you offer to lay hand on his 
day's wages, on his cow, or his right in common, or his shop,, 
he will fight to the Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial^ 
habeas-corpus, star-chamber, ship-money. Popery, Plymouth 
colony, American Revolution, are all questions involving 
a yeoman's right to his dinner, and, except as touching that^ 
would not have lashed the British nation to rage and revolt. 

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order, and of 
calculation, it must be owned they are capable of larger views ; 
but the indulgence is expensive to them, costs great crises^ 
or accumulations of mental power. In common, the horse 
works best with blinders. Nothing is more in the line of 
English thought, than our unvarnished Connecticut question,. 
''Pray, sir, how do you get your living when you are at home ? '^ 
The questions of freedom, of taxation, of privilege, are money 
questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer and fleshpots, 
they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy 
minds need to be flagellated by war and trade and politics 
and persecution. They cannot well read a principle, except 
by the light of fagots and of burning towns. 

Tacitus says of the Germans, ''powerful only in sudden 
efforts, they are impatient of toil and labor." This highly 
destined race, if it had not somewhere added the chamber 
of patience to its brain, would not have built London. I 
know not from which of the tribes and temperaments that 
went to the composition of the people this tenacity was 
supplied, but they clinch every nail they drive. They have 
no running for luck, and no immoderate speed. They spend 
largely on their fabric, and await the slow return. Their 



I 



272 CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 

leather lies tanning seven years in the vat. At Rogers's 
mills, in Sheffield, where I was shown the process of making 
a razor and a penknife, I was told there is no luck in making 
good steel ; that they make no mistakes, every blade in the 
hundred and in the thousand is good. And that is character- ■ 
istic of all their work, — no more is attempted than is done. I 

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he is 
told that ^^ nobody is permitted to remain here, unless he 
understand some art, and excel in it all other men.'' The 
same question is still put to the posterity of Thor. A nation 
of laborers, every man is trained to some one art or detail, 
and aims at perfection in that : not content unless he has 
something in which he thinks he surpasses all other men. 
He would rather not do anything at all, than not do it well. 
I suppose no people have such thoroughness : from the 
highest to the lowest, every man meaning to be master of 
his art. 

''To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the end 
of a speech in debate: ''no," said an Englishman, "but to 
set your shoulder at the wheel, — to advance the business." 
Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak in popular assemblies, 
confining himself to the House of Commons, where a measure 
can be carried by a speech. The business of the House of 
Commons is concluctecl by a few persons, but these are hard- 
worked. Sir Robert Peel "knew the Blue Books by heart." 
His colleagues and rivals carry Hansard in their heads. 
The high civil and legal offices are not beds of ease, but posts 
which exact frightful amounts of mental labor. Many of 
the great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, 
are soon worked to death. They are excellent judges in 
England of a good worker, and when they find one, hke 
Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry, 
Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or 
Russell, there is nothing too good or too high for him. 

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public aim. 
Private persons exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian re- 
searches, the same pertinacity as the nation showed in the 
coalitions in which it yoked Europe against the Empire of 
Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, and still renewed, 
until the sixth hurled him from his seat. 

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his father, 
who had made the catalogue of the stars of the northern 



CHAPTERS FROM '^ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 273 

hemisphere, expatriated himself for years at the Cape of 
Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern heaven, 
came home, and redacted it in eight years more ; — a work 
whose value does not begin until thirty years have elapsed, 
and thenceforward a record to all ages of the highest import. 
The Admiralty sent out the Arctic expeditions year after 
year, in search of Sir John Franklin, until, at last, they have 
threaded their way through polar pack and Behring^s Straits, 
and solved the geographical problem. Lord Elgin, at 
Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek remains, set 
up his scaffoldings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five 
years' labor to collect them, got his marbles on shipboard. 
The ship struck a rock, and went to the bottom. He had 
them all fished up, by divers, at a vast expense, and brought 
to London ; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and Canova, 
and all good heads in all the world, were to be his applauders. 
In the same spirit, were the excavation and research by 
Sir Charles Fellows, for the Xanthian monument; and of 
Layard, for his Nineveh sculptures. 

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, 
a London extended into every man's mind, though he five 
in Van Dieman's Land or Capetown. Faithful performance 
of what is undertaken to be performed, they honor in them- 
selves, and exact in others, as certificate of equality with 
themselves. The modern world is theirs. They have made 
and make it day by day. The commercial relations of the 
world are so intimately drawn to London, that every dollar 
on earth contributes to the strength of the English govern- 
ment. And if all the wealth in the planet should perish by 
war or deluge, they know themselves competent to replace it. 

They have approved their Saxon blood, by thoir sea- 
going qualities; their descent from Odin's smiths, by their 
hereditary skill in working in iron; their British birth, by 
husbandry and immense wheat harvests ; and justified their 
occupancy of the centre of habitable land, by their supreme 
ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, builded, 
forged, spun, and woven. They have made the island 
a thoroughfare ; and London a shop, a law-court, a record- 
office, and scientific bureau, inviting to strangers ; a sanctuary 
to refugees of every political and religious opinion ; and such 
a city, that almost every active man," in any nation, finds 
himself, at one time or other, forced to visit it. 



274 CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 



In every path of practical activity they have gone even 
with the best. There is no secret of war, in which they have 
not shown mastery. The steam-chamber of Watt, the 
locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts, 
perform the labor of the world. There is no department 
of literature, of science, or of useful art, in which they have 
not produced a first-rate book. It is England, whose opinion 
is waited for on the merit of a new invention, an improved 
science. And in the compHcations of the trade and politic; 
of their vast empire, they have been equal to every exigency 
with coimsel and with conduct. Is it their luck, or is it in thel 
chambers of their brain, — it is their commercial advantage 
that whatever hght appears in better method or happy 
invention, breaks out in their race. They are a family to 
which a destiny attaches, and the Banshee has sworn that 
a male heir shall never be wanting. They have a wealth of 
men to fill important posts, and the vigilance of party criticism 
insures the selection of a competent person. 

A proof of the energy of the British people is the highly 
artificial construction of the whole fabric. The cHmate and 
geography, I said, were factitious, as if the hands of man 
had arranged the conditions. The same character pervades 
the whole kingdom. Bacon said, '^Rome was a state not 
subject to paradoxes'^ ; but England subsists by antagonisms 
and contradictions. The foundations of its greatness are 
the roUing waves ; and, from first to last, it is a museum of 
anomahes. This foggy and rainy country furnishes the world 
with astronomical observations. Its short rivers do not 
afford water-power, but the land shakes under the thunder of 
the mills. There is no gold-mine of any importance, but 
there is more gold in England than in all other countries. 
It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the wines 
of all countries are in its docks. The French Comte de 
Lauraguais said, "no fruit ripens in England but a baked 
apple" ; but oranges and pineapples are as cheap in London 
as in the Mediterranean. The Mark-Lane Express, or the 
Custom-House Returns bear out to the letter the vaunt of 
Pope, — 

''Let India boast her palms, nor envy we 
The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree, 
While, by our oaks, those precious loads are borne, 
And realms commanded which those trees adorn." 






CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 275 

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of 
artificial breeds. The agriculturist Bake well created sheep 
and cows and horses to order, and breeds in which everything 
was omitted but what is economical. The cow is sacrificed 
to her bag, the ox to his surloin. Stall-feeding makes sperm- 
mills of the cattle, and converts the stable to a chemical 
factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds, too much fished, 
or obstructed by factories, are artificially filled with the eggs 
of salmon, turbot, and herring. 

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridge- 
shire are unhealthy and too barren to pay rent. By cyhn- 
drical tiles, and gutta-percha tubes, five millions of acres 
of bad land have been drained and put on equality with the 
best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate too, which 
was already believed to have become milder and drier by 
the enormous consumption of coal, is so far reached by 
this new action, that fogs and storms are said to disappear. 
In due course, all England will be drained, and rise a second 
time out of the waters. The latest step was to call in the 
aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is almost an Englishman. 
I do not know but they will send him to Parliament, next, 
to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans, and 
now he must pump, grind, dig, and plough for the farmer. 
The markets created by the manufacturing population have 
erected agriculture into a great thriving and spending in- 
dustry. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to the 
value of the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than 
the natural resources. No man can afford to walk, when the 
parliamentary train carries him for a penny a mile. Gas- 
burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in the 
cities. All the houses in London buy their water. The English 
trade does not exist for the exportation of native products, 
but on its manufactures, or the making well everything which 
h ill made elsewhere. They make ponchos for the Mexican, 
bandannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, beads 
for the Indian, laces for the Flemings, telescopes for astron- 
omers, cannons for kings. 

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and 
Italy to be placed within the reach of every manufacturing 
population. They caused to be translated from foreign 
languages and illustrated by elaborate drawings, the most 
approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. They have 



276 CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS" 

ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a grace to the 
products of their looms, their potteries, and their foundries. 

The nearer we look, th^ more artificial is their social system. 
Their law is a network of fictions. Their property, a script 
or certificate of right to interest on money that no man ever 
saw. Their social classes are made by statute. Their ratios 
of power and representation are historical and legal. The 
last reform-bill took away political power from a mound, 
a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst Birmingham and Manchester, 
whose mills paid for the wars of Europe, had no representative. 
Purity in the elective Parliament is secured by the purchase 
of seats. Foreign power is kept by armed colonies ; power 
at home, by a standing army of police. The pauper lives 
better than the free laborer ; the thief better than the pauper ; 
and the transported felon better than the one under imprison- 
ment. The crimes are factitious, as smuggling, poaching, 
non-conformity, heresy, and treason. Better, they say in 
England, kill a man than a hare. The sovereignty of the 
seas is maintained by the impressment of seamen. "The 
impressment of seamen," said Lord Eldon, "is the life of our 
navy." Solvency is maintained by means of a national 
debt, on the principle, "if you will not lend me the money, 
how can I pay you?" For the administration of justice. 
Sir Samuel Romilly's expedient for clearing the arrears of 
business in Chancery, was, the chancellor's staying away 
entirely from his court. Their system of education is facti- 
tious. The Universities galvanize dead languages into a 
semblance of life. Their church is artificial. The manners 
and customs of society are artificial ; — made-up men with 
made-up manners ; — and thus the whole is Birminghamized, 
and we have a nation whose existence is a work of art; 
— a cold, barren, almost arctic isle, being made the most 
fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land in the whole earth 

Man in England submits to be a product of political 
economy. On a bleak moor, a mill is built, a banking- 
house is opened, and men come in, as water in a sluiceway, 
and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham 
button. The rapid doubling of the population dates from 
Watt's steam-engine. A landlord, who owns a provinceji 
says, "the tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep. '^1 
He unroofs the houses, and ships the population to America. 
The nation is accustomed to the instantaneous creation of 






CHAPTERS FROM ''ENGLISH TRAITS^' 277 

wealth. It is the maxim of their economists, ''that the greater 
part in value of the wealth now existing in England has been 
produced by human hands within the last twelve months /'^ 
Meantime, three or four days' rain will redu(;e hundreds to 
starving in London. 

One secret of their power is their mutual good under- 
standing. Not only good minds are born among them, 
but all the people have good minds. Every nation has 
yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes, 
only "one. But the intellectual organization of the English [ 
admits a communicableness of knowledge and ideas among; 
them all. An electric touch by any of their national ideas, 
melts them into one family, and brings the hoards of power 
which their individuality is always hiving, into use and play 
for all. Is it the smallness of the country, or is it the pride 
and affection of race, — they have solidarity, or responsible- 
ness, and trust in each other. 

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more lasting 
than the cloth. They embrace their cause with more tenacity 
than their life. Though not military, yet every common 
subject by the poll is fit to make a soldier of. These private,, 
reserved, mute family-men can adopt a public end with all 
their heat, and this strength of affection makes the romance 
of their heroes. The difference of rank does not divide the 
national heart. The Danish poet Oehlenschlager complains 
that who writes in Danish writes to two hundred readers. 
In Germany, there is one speech for the learned, and another 
for the masses, to that extent, that it is said no sentiment 
or phrase from the works of any great German writer is ever 
heard among the lower classes. But in England, the language 
of the noble is the language of the poor. In Parliament, 
in pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers rise to thought and 
passion, the language becomes idiomatic ; the people in the 
street best understand the best words. And their language 
seems drawn from the Bible, the common law, and the 
works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, 
Burns, and Scott. The island has produced two or three of 
the greatest men that ever existed, but they were not solitary 
in their own time. Men quickly embodied what Newton 
found out, in Greenwich observatories, and practical navi- 
gation. The boys knew all that Hutton knew of strata^ 
or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels; and these 



278 CHAPTERS FROM '^ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 

studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what is invented 
or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, or in art, or 
in literature, and antiquities. A great ability, not amassed 
on a few giants, but poured into the general mind, so that 
each of them could at a pinch stand in the shoes of the other ; 
and they are more bound in character than differenced in 
ability or in rank. The laborer is a possible lord. The lord 
is a possible basket-maker. Every man carries the English 
system in his brain, knows what is confided to him, and does 
therein the best he can. The chancellor carries England on 
Ms mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith 
on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon ; the 
postilion cracks his whip for England, and the sailor times 
his oars to ^^God save the King!^' The very felons have 
their pride in each other's English stanchness. In politics 
and in war, they hold together as by hooks of steel. The 
charm in Nelson's history is, the unselfish greatness; the 
assurance of being supported to the uttermost by those 
whom he supports to the uttermost. Whilst they are some 
ages ahead of the rest of the world in the art of living ; whilst 
in some directions they do not represent the modern spirit, 
but constitute it, — this vanguard of civility and power they 
coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lock-step, foot after foot, 
file after file of heroes, ten thousand deep. 

CHARACTER 

The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that 
they have sadder brows than their neighbors of northern 
climates. They are sad by comparison with the singing 
and dancing nations : not sadder, but slow and staid, as 
finding their joys at home. They, too, believe that where 
there is no enjoyment of life, there can be no vigor and art 
in speech or thought ; that your merry heart goes all the way, 
your sad one tires in a mile. This trait of gloom has been 
fixed on them by French travellers, who, from Froissart, 
Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists 
of the feuilletons, have spent their wit on the solemnity of 
their neighbors. The French say, gay conversation is un- 
known in their island: the Englishman finds no relief from 
reflection except in reflection : when he wishes for amuse- 
ment, he goes to work : his hilarity is like an attack of fever, 






CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS^' 279 

Religion, the theatre, and the reading the books of his coun- 
try, all feed and increase his natural melancholy. The police 
does not interfere with public diversions. It thinks itself 
bound in duty to respect the pleasures and rare gayety of 
this inconsolable nation; and their well-known courage is 
entirely attributable to their disgust of life. 

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words 
have obtained this reputation. As compared with the 
Americans, I think them cheerful and contented. Young 
people, in our country, are much more prone to melancholy. 
The English have a mild aspect, and a ringing, cheerful voice. 
They are large-natured, and not so easily amused as the 
southerners, and are among them as grown people among- 
children, requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or science^ 
instead of frivolous games. They are proud and private, and,, 
even if disposed to recreation, will avoid an open garden. 
They sported sadly; Us s'amusaient tristementy selon la cou- 
tume de leur pays, said Froissart; and, I suppose, never 
nation built their party walls so thick, or their garden fences 
so high. Meat and wine produce no effect on them : they 
are just as cold, quiet, and composed, at the end, as at the 
beginning of dinner. 

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six 
or seven hundred years; and a kind of pride in bad public 
speaking is noted in the House of Commons, as if they were 
willing to show that they did not live by their tongues, or 
thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of 
gentlemen. In mixed company, they shut their mouths. 
A Yorkshire mill-owner told me, he had ridden more than 
once all the way from London to Leeds, in the first-class 
carriage, with the same persons, and no word exchanged. 
The club-houses were established to cultivate social habits^ 
and it is rare that more than two eat together, and oftenest 
one eats alone. Was it then a stroke of humor in the serious 
Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless logic, that made him 
shut up the English souls in a heaven by themselves? 

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, and 
stubborn, — and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth is^ 
they have great range and variety of character. Commerce 
sends abroad multitudes of different classes. The choleric 
Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in the East 
or West Indies, are wide of the perfect behavior of the edu- 



280 CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS'' 

cated and dignified man of family. So is the burly farmer ; 
so is the country 'squire, with his narrow and violent life. 
In every inn is the Commercial-Room, in which travellers/ 
or bagmen who carry patterns, and solicit orders for the 
manufacturers, are wont to be entertained. It easily hap- 
pens that this class should characterize England to the 
foreigner, who meets them on the road, and at every public 
house, whilst the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude them- 
selves whilst in them. 

But these classes are the right English stock, and may 
fairly show the national qualities, before yet art and educa- 
tion have dealt with them. They are good lovers, good 
haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and, in all things, very 
much steeped in their temperament, like men hardly awaked 
from deep sleep, which they enjoy. Their habits and in- 
stincts cleave to nature. They are of the earth, and of the 
sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for what it yields them, 
and not from any sentiment. They are full of coarse strength, 
rude exercise, butcher's meat, and sound sleep ; and suspect 
any poetic insinuation or any hint for the conduct of life 
which reflects on this animal existence, as if somebody were 
fumbling at the umbilical cord and might stop their supplies. 
They doubt a man's sound judgment, if he does not eat with 
appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly chaste. 
Take them as they come, you shall find in the common people 
a surly indifference, sometimes gruff ness and ill temper ; and, 
in minds of more power, magazines of inexhaustible war, 
challenging 

''The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring 
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland.'' 

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, 
and not less resolute in maintaining their whim and per- 
versity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a book against the 
Lord's Prayer. And one can believe that Burton the An- 
atomist of Melancholy, having predicted from the stars the 
hour of his death, slipped the knot himself round his own 
neck, not to falsify his horoscope. 

Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness; they have 
extreme difficulty to run away, and will die game. Wel- 
lington said of the young coxcombs of the Life-Guards 
delicately brought up, "But the puppies fight well"; and- 



CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS^' 281 

Nelson said of his sailors, "They really mind shot no more 
than peas/^ Of absolute stoutness no nation has more or 
better examples. They are good at storming redoubts, at 
boarding frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate 
service which has daylight and honor in it ; but not, I think, 
at enduring the rack, or any passive obedience, like jumping 
off a castle-roof at the word of a czar. Being both vascular 
and highly organized, so as to be very sensible of pain ; and 
intellectual, so as to see reason and glory in a matter. 

Of that constitutional force which yields the supplies of the 
day, they have the more than enough. The excess which 
creates courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, invention in 
mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence in wealth, splen- 
dor in ceremonies, petulance and projects in youth. The 
young men have a rude health which runs into peccant 
humors. They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their 
quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, 
and fencing, and run into absurd frolics with the gravity of 
the Eumenides. Thej^ stoutly carry into every nook and cor- 
ner of the earth their turbulent sense ; leaving no lie uncon- 
tradicted, no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh ; 
cut themselves with poisoned creases ; swing their hammock 
in the boughs of the Bohon Upas ; taste ever^^ poison ; buy 
every secret ; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an 
alembic ; they saw a hole into the head of the "winking 
Virgin," to know why she winks; measure with an English 
foot-rule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish caaba, 
every Holy of holies; translate and send to Bentley the 
arcanum bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bramins ; 
and measure their own strength by the terror they cause. 
These travellers are of every class, the best and the worst ; 
and it may easily happen that those of rudest behavior are 
taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon melancholy 
in the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor, 
which every check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. 
There are multitudes of rude young English who have the 
self-sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, with 
their disdain of the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion 
and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for 
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad de- 
scription of the Briton generically, what was said two hundred 
years ago, of one particular Oxford scholar : "He was a very 



282 CHAPTERS FROM '^ENGLISH TRAITS'' < 

bold man, uttered anything that came into his mind, not only 
among his companions, but in public coffee-houses, and 
would often speak his mind of particular persons then acci- 
dentally present, without examining the company he was in ; 
for which he was often reprimanded, and several times 
threatened to be kicked and beaten/' 

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal 
article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a right 
to his own ears. No man can claim to usurp more than a 
few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, or to put 
upon the company the loud statements of his crotchets or 
personalities. 

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of 
nations are written, and however derived, whether a happier 
tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or what circumstance, that 
mixed for them the golden mean of temperament, — here 
exists the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad- 
bottomed, best for depth, range, and equability, men of aplomb 
and reserves, great range and many moods, strong instincts, 
yet apt for culture; war-class as well as clerks; earls and 
tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish majority; abys- 
mal temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which 
no sunshine settles ; alternated with a common-sense and 
humanity which hold them fast to every piece of cheerful 
duty; making this temperament a sea to which all storms 
axe superficial ; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if they 
alone had the elastic organization at once fine and robust 
enough for dominion ; as if the burly, inexpressive, now mute 
and contumacious, now fierce and sharp-tongued dragon, 
which once made the island light with his fiery breath, had 
bequeathed his ferocity to his conqueror. They hide virtues 
under vices, or the semblance of them. It is the misshapen 
hairy Scandinavian troll again, who lifts the cart out of the 
mire, or ^^ threshes the corn that ten day-laborers could not 
end," but it is done in the dark, and with muttered male- 
dictions. He is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose 
speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you 
at a pinch. He says no, but serves you, and your thanks 
disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd and 
ugly, resembhng in countenance the portrait of Punch, with 
the laugh left out; rich by his own industry; sulking in a 
lonely house ; who never gave a dinner to any man, and dis- 



CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS'' 283 

dained all courtesies ; yet as true a worshipper of beauty in 
form and color as ever existed, and profusely pouring over the 
cold mind of his countrymen creations of grace and truth, 
removing the reproach of sterility from English art, catching 
from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into 
their galleries every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies ; 
making an era in painting ; and, when he saw that the splendor 
of one of his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rivaFs- 
that hung next it, secretly took a brush and blackened his own. 

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws ta 
peck at. They have that phlegm or staidness, which it is a 
compliment to disturb. "Great men,'' said Aristotle, "are 
always of a nature originally melancholy." 'T is the habit 
cf a mind which attaches to abstractions with a passion which 
gives vast results. They dare to displease, they do not speak 
to expectation. They like the sayers of No, better than the 
sayers of Yes. Each of them has an opinion which he feels it- 
becomes him to express all the more that it differs from yours. 
They are meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable 
from minds of great resources. 

There is an EngHsh hero superior to the French, the Ger- 
man, the ItaHan, or the Greek. When he is brought to the 
strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer material possession, and 
on more purely metaphysical grounds. He is there with his 
own consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies. On 
deliberate choice, and from grounds of character, he has 
elected his part to five and die for, and dies with grandeur^ 
This race has added new elements to humanity, and has a 
deeper root in the world. 

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to exquisite 
refinement. With larger scale, they have great retrieving 
power. After running each tendency to an extreme, they try 
another tack with equal heat. More intellectual than other 
races, when they five with other races, they do not take their 
language, but bestow their own. They subsidize other 
nations, and are not subsidized. They proselyte, and are not 
proselyted. They assimilate other races to themselves, and 
are not assimilated. The Enghsh did not calculate the con- 
quest of the Indies. It fell to their character. So they 
administer in different parts of the world, the codes of every 
empire and race : in Canada, old French law ; in the Mau- 
ritius, the Code Napoleon ; in the West Indies, the edicts of 



284 CHAPTERS FROM '^ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 

the Spanish Cortes ; in the East Indies, the Laws of Menu ; 
in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing ; at the Cape 
of Good Hope, of the Old Netherlands ; and in the Ionian 
Islands, the Pandects of Justinian. 

They are very conscious of their advantageous position in 
Jiistory. England is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, 
the ally. Compare the tone of the French and of the English 
press: the first querulous, captious, sensitive, about English 
opinion; the English press is never timorous about French 
opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous. 

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will 
and bias ; churlish as men sometimes please to be who do not 
forget a debt, who ask no favors, and who will do what they 
like with their own. With education and intercourse these 
.asperities wear off, and leave the good-will pure. If anatomy 
is reformed according to national tendencies, I suppose, the 
spleen will hereafter be found in the Englishman, not found 
in the American, and differencing the one from the other. I 
anticipate another anatomical discovery, that this organ will 
be found to be cortical and caducous, that they are superfi- 
cially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differing 
from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing savage, nothing 
mean resides in the English heart. They are subject to 
panics of credulity and of rage, but the temper of the nation, 
however disturbed, settles itseK soon and easily, as, in this 
temperate zone, the sky after whatever storms clears again, 
and serenity is its normal condition. 

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception as 
the curtain of the eagle's e^^e. Our smfter Americans, when 
they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid ; but, 
later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their 
strength. To understand the power of performance that is 
in their finest wits, in the patient Newton, or in the versatile 
transcendent poets, or in the Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, 
Eldons, and Peels, one should see how English day-laborers 
hold out. High and low, they are of an unctuous texture. 
There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil 
also for their mental wheels, and could perform vast amounts 
of work without damaging themselves. 

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to which 
scholars and professional men conform, proves the tension 
of their muscle, when vast numbers are found who can each 



CHAPTERS FROM '^ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 285 

lift this enormous load. I might even add, their daily feasts 
argue a savage vigor of body. 

No nation was ever so rich in able men: ^'Gentlemen/' 
as Charles I. said of Strafford, ^^ whose abihties might make a 
prince rather afraid than ashamed in the greatest affairs of 
state" : men of such temper, that, like Baron Vere, "had one 
seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence 
have suspected that he had lost the day ; and, had he beheld 
him in a retreat, he would have collected him a conqueror by 
the cheerfulness of his spirit." 

The following passage from the Heimskringla might almost 
stand as a portrait of the modern Englishman : "Haldor was 
very stout and strong, and remarkably handsome in appear- 
ances. King Harold gave him this testimony, that he, 
among'^all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances, 
whether they betokened danger or pleasure ; for, whatever 
turned up, he was never in higher nor in lower spirits, never 
slept less nor more on account of them, nor ate nor drank but 
according to his custom. Haldor was •not a man of many 
words, but short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, 
and was obstinate and hard; and this could not please the 
king, who had many clever people about him, zealous in his 
service. Haldor remained a short .time with the king, and 
then came to Iceland, where he took up his abode in Hiarda- 
holt, and dwelt in that farm to a very advanced age." 

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or 
whiffling. The slow, deep, English mass smoulders with fire, 
which at last sets all its borders in flame. The wrath of 
Ijondon is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and, in 
its hottest heat, a register and rule. 

Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable 
of a sublime resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, often 
predicted, and making itseK a war of opinions also (a question 
of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), 
should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may 
take once again to their floating castles, and find a new home 
and a second millennium of power in their colonies. 

The stability of England is the security of the modern 
world. If the English race were as mutable as the French, 
what reliance? But the Enghsh stand for liberty. The 
conservative, money-loving, lord-loving English are yet 
liberty-loving ; and so freedom is safe : for they have more 



286 CHAPTERS FROM ^^ ENGLISH TRAITS'' 

personal force than other people. The nation always resist 
the immoral action of their government. They think hu- 
manely on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of 
Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein, though overborne by the 
statecraft of the rulers at last. 

Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent 
bias, which, though not less potent, is masked, as the tribe 
spreads its activity into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, 
letters? The early history shows it, as the musician plays 
the air which he proceeds to conceal in a tempest of variations. 
In Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the 
English society, namely, that private life is the place of honor. 
Glory, a career, and ambition, words familiar to the longi- 
tude of Paris, are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson 
wrote from their hearts his homely telegraph, ^'England 
expects every man to do his duty.'' 

For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to 
appease diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy may 
be entered (the worst boys doing well in the navy) ; and the 
civil service, in departments where serious official work is 
done ; and they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the 
severer studies of the law. But the calm, sound, and most 
British Briton shrinks from public life, as charlatanism, and 
respects an economy founded on agriculture, coal-mines, 
manufactures, or trade, which secures an independence 
through the creation of real values. 

They wish neither to command or obey, but to be kings 
in their own houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy 
literature ; they like well to have the world served up to them 
in books, maps, models, and everj^ mode of exact information, 
and, though not creators in the art, they value its refinement. 
They are ready for leisure, can direct and fill their own day, 
nor need so much as others the constraint of a necessity. 
But the history of the nation discloses, at every turn, this 
original predilection for private independence, and, however 
this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes with 
which their vast colonial power has warped men out of orbit, 
the inclination endures, and forms and reforms the laws, 
letters, manners, and occupations. They choose that wel- 
fare which is compatible with the commonwealth, knowing 
that such alone is stable ; as wise merchants prefer invest- 
ments in the three per cents. 






CHAPTERS FROM ^^ ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 287 



WEALTH 



There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid 
to wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame when a 
man exhibits the evidences of large property, as if, after all, 
it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in 
his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic 
rules throughout all English souls ; — if you have merit, can 
you not show it by your good clothes, and coach, and horses? 
How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe of wine? 
Haydon says, ^^ There is a fierce resolution to make every 
man live according to the means he possesses.^' There is a 
mixture of religion in it. They are under the Jewish law, 
and read with sonorous emphasis that their days shall be 
long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, flocks 
and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion is the reproach 
of poverty. They do not wish to be represented except by 
opulent men. An Englishman who has lost his fortune is 
said to have died of a broken heart. The last term of insult 
is, ^'a beggar.^' Nelson said, ^^The want of fortime is a 
crime which I can never get over.^^ Sydney Smith said, 
'^ Poverty is infamous in England. ^^ And one of their recent- 
writers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic life, of 
'Hhe grave moral deterioration which follows an empty 
exchequer.'' You shall find this sentiment, if not so frankh^ 
put, yet deeply implied, in the novels and romances of the 
present century, and not only in these, but in biography, 
and in the votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the 
preaching, and in the table-talk. 

I was lately turning over Wood's Athence Oxonienses, and 
looking naturally for another standard in a chronicle of the 
scholars of Oxford for two hundred years. But I found the 
two disgraces in that, as in most English books, are, first, 
disloyalty to Church and State, and, second, to be born poor, 
or to come to poverty. A natural fruit of England is the 
brutal political economy. Malthus finds no cover laid at 
nature's table for the laborer's son. In 1809, the majority 
in Parliament expressed itself by the language of Mr. Fuller 
in the House of Commons, ^'If you do not like the country, 
damn you, you can leave it." When Sir S. Romilly pro- 
posed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind children 
apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles from their 



288 CHAPTERS FROM '^ENGLISH TRAITS^' 

home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, ^ though, in the 
higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a good thing, 
^t was not so among the lower orders. Better take them 
away from those who might deprave them. And it was 
highly injurious to trade to stop binding to manufacturers, 
as it must raise the price of labor, and of manufactured 
goods.'' 

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only 
by the respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of art of 
the Saxon, as he is a wealth-maker, and his passion for inde- 
pendence. The Englishman believes that every man must 
take care of himself, and has himseK to thank, if he do not 
mend his condition. To pay their debts is their national 
point of honor. From the Exchequer and the East India 
House to the huckster's shop, everything prospers, because 
it is solvent. The British armies are solvent, and pay for 
what they take. The British empire is solvent; for, in spite 
of the huge national debt, the valuation mounts. During 
the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst they complained that they 
were taxed within an inch of their lives, and, by dint of 
enormous taxes, were subsidizing all the continent against 
France, the English were growing rich every year faster than 
any people ever grew before. It is their maxim, that the 
weight of taxes must be calculated, not by what is taken, but 
by what is left. Solvency is in the ideas and mechanism of 
an EngHshman. The Crystal Palace is not considered honest 
until it pays ; no matter how much convenience, beauty, or 
eclatj it must be self-supporting. They are contented with 
slower steamers, as long as they know that swifter boats lose 
money. They proceed logically by the double method of 
labor and thrift. Every household exhibits an exact economy, 
and nothing of that uncalculated headlong expenditure which 
families use in America. If they cannot pay, they do not 
buy ; for they have no presumption of better fortunes next 
year, as our people have ; and they say without shame, I 
cannot afford it. Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the 
second-class cars, or in the second cabin. An economist, or 
a man who can proportion his means and his ambition, or 
bring the year round with expenditure which expresses his 
character, without embarrassing one day of his future, is 
already a master of life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh 
writes to his son, ^Hhat one ought never to devote more 



CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 289> 

than two thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of life, 
since the extraordinary will be certain to absorb the other 
third/' 

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability ; 
government becomes a manufacturing corporation, and 
every house a mill. The headlong bias to utility will let no 
talent lie in a napkin, — if possible, will teach spiders to 
weave silk stockings. An Englishman, while he eats and 
drinks no more, or not much more than another man, labors 
three times as many hours in the course of a year, as any other 
European ; or, his life as a workman is three lives. He works 
fast. Everything in England is at a quick pace. They have 
reinforced their own productivity, by the creation of that 
marvellous machinery which differences this age from any 
other age. 

'T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of 
the machine-shop. Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon 
explained the precession of the equinoxes, the consequent 
necessity of the reform of the calendar ; measured the length 
of the year, invented gunpowder ; and announced (as if look- 
ing from his lofty cell, over five centuries, into ours) ^Hhat 
machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly 
than a whole galley of rowers could do ; nor would they need 
anything but a pilot to steer them. Carriages also might 
be constructed to move with an incredible speed, without 
the aid of any animal. Finally, it would not be impossible 
to make machines, which, by means of a suit of wings, should 
fly in the air in the manner of birds.'' But the secret slept 
with Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet fulfilled 
his words. Two centuries ago, the sawing of timber was. 
done by hand ; the carriage-wheels ran on wooden axles ; 
the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And it was to little 
purpose that they had pit-coal or that looms were improved, 
unless Watt and Stephenson had taught them to work force- 
pumps and power-looms by steam. The great strides were 
all taken within the last hundred years. The life of Sir 
Robert Peel, in his day the model Englishman, very properly 
has, for a frontispiece, a drawing of the spinning-jenny, 
which wove the web of his fortunes. Hargreaves invented 
the spinning- jenny, and died in a workhouse. Arkwright 
imy^roved the invention; and the machine dispensed with 
the work of ninety-nine men : that is, one spinner could dO' 



290 CHAPTERS FROM '^ ENGLISH TRAITS^' 

^s much work as one hundred had done before. The loom 
was improved further. But the men would sometimes strike 
for wages, and combine against the masters, and, about 
1829-30, much fear was felt, lest the trade would be drawn 
^way by these interruptions, and the emigration of the 
spinners, to Belgium and the United States. Iron and steel 
are very obedient. Whether it were not possible to make a 
spinner that would not rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike 
for wages, nor emigrate ? At the solicitation of the masters, 
after a mob and riot at Stale}^ Bridge, Mr. Roberts of Man- 
chester undertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of 
the quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a few trials, 
he succeeded, and, in 1830, procured a patent for his seK- 
acting mule ; a creation, the dehght of mill-owners, and 
*' destined,^' they said, 'Ho restore order among the indus- 
trious classes'' ; a machine requiring only a child's hand to 
piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed do- 
mestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed the factory spinner. 
The power of machinery in Great Britain, in mills, has been 
computed to be equal to 600,000,000 men, one man being 
able by the aid of steam to do the work which required two 
hundred and fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago. The 
production has been commensurate. England already had 
this laborious race, rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and 
favorable cHmate. Eight hundred years ago, commerce had 
made it rich, and it was recorded, '^ England is the richest 
of all the northern nations. '^ The Norman historians recite, 
that ''in 1067, William carried with him into Normandy, 
from England, more gold and silver than had ever before 
been seen in Gaul." But when, to this labor and trade and 
these native resources was added this goblin of steam, with 
his myriad arms, never tired, working night and day ever- 
lastingly, the amassing of property has run out of all figures. 
It makes the motor of the last ninety years. The steam-pipe 
has added to her population and wealth the equivalent of 
four or Rye Engiands. Forty thousand ships are entered in 
Lloyd's lists. The yield of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 
quarters in the time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854. 
A thousand milhon pounds sterling are said to compose the 
floating money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Russell 
•stated that the people of this country had laid out £300- 
€00,000 of capital in railways, in the last four years. But a 



m 



CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS" 291 

better measure than these sounding figures is the estimate^ 
that there is wealth enough in England to support the entire 
population in idleness for one year. 

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels^ 
roads, locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar 
to a millionth of an inch. Steam twines huge cannon into 
wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies with the vol- 
canic forces which twisted the strata. It can clothe shingle 
mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that will cut 
gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it can plant forests, and bring 
rain after three thousand years. Already it is ruddering the 
balloon, and the next war will be fought in the air. But 
another machine more potent in England than steam is the 
Bank. It votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated, 
and cities rise ; it refuses loans, and emigration empties the 
country ; trade sinks ; revolutions break out ; kings are de- 
throned. By these new agents our social system is moulded. 
By dint of steam and of money, war and commerce are 
changed. Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the 
patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, 
we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men ta 
choose what law they will Uve under. Money makes place 
for them. The telegraph is a Hmp-band that will hold the 
- Fenris-wolf of war. For now, that a telegraph line runs 
through France and Europe, from London, every message it 
transmits makes stronger by one thread the band which war 
will have to cut. 

The introduction of these elements gives new resources to 
existing proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that the 
state depends on the House of Lords, but the engineer sees, 
that every stroke of the steam-piston gives value to the duke's 
land, fills it with tenants ; doubles, quadruples, centuples the 
duke's capital, and creates new measures and new neces- 
sities for the culture of his children. Of course, it draws the 
nobility into the competition as stockholders in the mine, 
the canal, the railway, in the application of steam to agri- 
culture, and sometimes into trade. But it also introduces 
large classes into the same competition ; the old energy of the 
Norse race arms itself with these magnificent powers; new 
men prove an overmatch for the land-owner, and the mill 
buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor, who once forged 
his bolts in icy Hecla, and built galleys by lonely fiords, in: 



292 CHAPTERS FROM ^^ ENGLISH TRAITS^' 

England has advanced with the times, has shorn his beard, 
enters ParHament, sits down at a desk in the India House, 
^nd lends MioUnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer. 

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years 
is a main fact in modern history. The wealth of London 
determines prices all over the globe. All things precious, or 
useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are sucked into this com- 
merce and floated to London. Some English private for- 
tunes reach, and some exceed, a million of dollars a year. A 
hundred thousand palaces adorn the island. All that can 
feed the senses and passions, all that can succor the talent, 
or arm the hands of the intelligent middle class who never 
spare in what they buy for their own consumption ; all that 
can aid science, gratify taste, or soothe comfort, is in open 
market. Whatever is excellent and beautiful in civil, rural, 
or ecclesiastic architecture ; in fountain, garden, or grounds ; 
the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy at 
home. The taste and science of thirty peaceful generations ; 
the gardens which Evel}^ planted ; the temples and pleasure- 
houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren built; the 
wood that Gibbons carved ; the taste of foreign and domestic 
artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, are in the 
vast auction, and the hereditary principle heaps on the 
owner of to-day the benefit of ages of owners. The present • 
possessors are to the full as absolute as any of their fathers, in 
choosing and procuring what they like. This comfort and 
splendor, the breadth of lake and mountain, tillage, pasture, 
and park, sumptuous castle and modern villa, — all consist 
with perfect order. They have no revolutions; no horse- 
guards dictating to the crown; no Parisian poissardes and 
barricades ; no mob ; but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, 
wine, and alo, and beer, and gin, and sleep. 

With this power cf creation, and this passion for inde- 
pendence, property has reached an ideal perfection. It is 
felt and treated as the national life-blood. The laws are 
framed to give property the securest possible basis, and the 
provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cun- 
ningest heads in a profession which never admits a fool. The 
rights of property nothing but felony and treason can over- 
ride. The house is a castle which the king cannot enter. 
The Bank is a strong-box to which the king has no key. 
IVhatever surly sweetness possession can give, is tasted in 



I 



CHAPTERS FROM "ENGLISH TRAITS ^^ 293 

England to the dregs. Vested rights are awful things, and 
absolute possession gives the smallest freeholder identity of 
interest with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked 
garden gates announce the absolute will of the owner to be 
alone. Every whim of exaggerated egotism is put into stone 
and iron, into silver and gold, with costly deliberation and 
detail. 

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes to 
establish some claim to put her park paling a rod forward 
into his grounds, so as to get a coachway, and save her a 
mile to the avenue. Instanth'' he transforms his paling into 
stone masonry, soHd as the walls of Cuma, and all Europe 
cannot prevail on him to sell or compound for an inch of the 
land. They dehght in a freak as the proof of their sovereign 
freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic Park, at Cadenham, 
on a precipice of incomparable prospect, built a house like a 
long barn, which had not a mndow on the prospect side. 
Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr. 
Beckford, were freaks ; and Newstead Abbey became one in 
the hands of Lord Byron. 

But the proudest result of this creation has been the great 
and refined forces it has put at the disposal of the private 
citizen. In the social world, an Englishman to-day has the 
best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He goes with the 
most powerful protection, keeps the best company, is armed 
by the best education, is seconded by wealth ; and his English 
name and accidents are like a flourish of trumpets announcing 
him. This, with his quiet style of manners, gives him the 
power of a sovereign, without the inconveniences which belong 
to that rank. I much prefer the condition of an English 
gentleman of the better class, to that of any potentate in 
Europe, — whether for travel, or for opportunity of society, 
or for access to means of science or study, or for mere com- 
fort and easy healthy relation to people at home. 

Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a mighty 
mass, and made good in whatever details we care to explore. 
The cause and spring of it is the wealth of temperament in 
the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. 
Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as them- 
selves ; each is a captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of 
men is represented again in the faculty of each individual, — 
that he has waste strength, power to spare. The English are 



294 CHAPTERS FROM ''ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 



so rich, and seem to have established a taproot in the bowels 
of the planet, because they are constitutionally fertile and 
creative. 

But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would 
not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is 
ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own struc- 
ture, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, 
and leather, to some required function in the work of the 
world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user. 
What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power. 
There should be temperance in making cloth, as well as in 
eating. A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a 
tent of caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in 
the mills to the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Man- 
chester spinner, — far on the way to be spiders and needles. 
The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the 
man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versatiUty, to make a 
pin-polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and 
presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed 
like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoestrings supersedes 
buckles, when cotton takes the place of Hnen, or railways of 
turnpilvcs, or when commons are enclosed by landlords. 
Then society is admonished of the mischief of the di\asion of 
labor, and that the best pohtical economy is care and culture 
of men ; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are 
proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice 
and the appUcation of their talent to new labor. Then again 
come in new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure 
of her fraud in the adulteration of food, of drugs, and of 
almost every fabric in her mills and shops ; finding that milk 
will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread satisfy, nor 
pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. In true England all 
is false and forged. This too is the reaction of machinery, 
but of the larger machinery of commerce. T is not, I 
suppose, want of probity, so much as the tyranny of trade, 
which necessitates a perpetual competition of underselUng, 
and that again a perpetual deterioration of the fabric. 

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, 
and flies away with the aeronaut. Steam from the first 
hissed and screamed to warn him; it was dreadful with its 
explosion, and crushed the engineer. The machinist has 
wrought and watched, engineers and firemen without number 



1 

^1^ ■ 



4 



CHAPTERS FROM ^'ENGLISH TRAITS'^ 295 

have been sacrificed in learning to tame and guide the mon- 
ster. But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the 
dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and 
Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Robinson, and their Parha- 
ments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, 
and went to their graves in the belief that they were en- 
riching the country which they were impoverishing. They 
congratulated each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare 
to find a merchant who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, 
why prices rise or fall, or who knows the mischief of paper 
money. In the culmination of national prosperity, in the 
annexation of countries; building of ships, depots, towns; 
in the influx of tons of gold and silver ; amid the chuckle of 
chancellors and financiers, it was found that bread rose to 
famine prices, that the yeoman was forced to sell his cow 
and pig, his tools, and his acre of land; and the dreadful 
barometer of the poor-rates was touching the point of ruin. 
The poor-rate was sucking in the solvent classes, and forcing 
an exodus of farmers and mechanics. What befalls from 
the violence of financial crises, befalls daily in the violence of 
artificial legislation. 

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous, 
and augmenting. But the question recurs, does she take the 
step beyond, namely, to the wise use, in view of the supreme 
wealth of nations? We estimate the wisdom of nations by 
seeing what they did with their surplus capital. And, in 
view of these injuries, some compensation has been attempted 
in England. A part of the money earned returns to the brain 
to buy schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, and 
artists with ; and a part to repair the wrongs of this intem- 
perate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks. Mechanics' In- 
stitutes, public grounds, and other charities and amenities. 
But the antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil 
requires a deeper cure, which time and a simpler social organ- 
ization must supply. At present, she does not rule her 
wealth. She is simply a good England, but no divinity, or 
wise and instructed soul. She too is in the stream of fate, 
one victim more in a common catastrophe. 

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness 
to be held as the chief offender. England must be held re- 
sponsible for the despotism of expense. Her prosperity, the 



296 CHAPTERS FROM '' ENGLISH TRAITS^' | 

splendor which so much manhood and talent and perse- 
verance has thro^vn upon vulgar aims, is the very argumenlll 
of materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of has*' 
wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and wisdom, 
when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and 
arts ; when EngHsh success has grown out of the very renun- 
ciation of principles, and the dedication to outsides. A 
civility of trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of sen- 
sation takes place, and the putting as many impediments 
as we can, between the man and his objects. Hardly the 
bravest among them have the manhness to resist it suc- 
cessfully. Hence, it has come, that not the aims of a manly 
life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, 
is that which is to be considered by a youth in England 
emerging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a 
misfortune. And it is a consolation in the death of the 
young, that a source of expense is closed. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

I . WORKS 

The best edition of Emerson's Works is the Centenary Edi- 
tion in twelve volumes, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and 
published by the Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston, 1903-1904 
Ihe Concord Edition, 1904, is a reprint of this edition. 

In a uniform edition with the Works, the Journals of Emer- 
son, edited by E W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, have been issued 
m ten valumes, Boston, 1909-1914. 

Certain additional writings of Emerson are included in Un- 
collected Writings, edited by Charles C. Bigelow, New York, 1912. 

I BIOGRAPHIES 

Among the most useful lives of Emerson are the following r 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in American 

Men of Letters Series, Boston, 1885. 
A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James EUiot Cabot 2 v 

Boston, 1887. ' 

Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Richard Garnett, in Great 

Writers Series, London, 1888. 
Emerson at Home and Abroad, by Moncure D. Conway, Boston 

loo2. ' 

f T?'''1t^^'?''''??'''^' Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston, 1889 
Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings and Philosophy, 

George Willis Cooke, Boston, 1881. 

BoS?\9^r'''''' Frankhn Sanborn. Beacon Biographies, 
^'^erson^ Poet and Thinker, Elizabeth Luther Gary, New York, 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, George E. Woodberry, English Men of 

Letters Series, New York, 1907. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, O. W. Firkins, Boston, 1915 
Records of a Lifelong Friendship, 1807-1882. Ralph Waldo 

Emerson and William Henry Furness, edited by Horace 

Howard Furness, Boston, 1910. 

297 



298 BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHIES 

The best bibliography of Emerson is that edited by George | 
WiUis Cooke, Boston, 1908. 

There is a selected bibliography by Harrison Ross Steeves in 
the Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pages 
551-566. 



\ 



ARTICLES 



4 



Among the many articles upon Emerson; probably the most 
helpful are those included in the following works: 
My Study Windows, James Russell Lowell, Boston, 1871. 
Poets of America, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Boston, 1885. 
Partial Portraits, Henry James, London, 1888. 
Literary and Social Essays, George William Curtis, New York, 

1894. 
American Prose Masters, William C. Brownell, New York, 1909. 
Cambridge History of American Literature, Chap. IX, Vol. I, 

"Emerson" by Paul Elmer More — New York, 1917. 



^ 



ST 

fHU M 



-t^r^... 


















A°<, 








O "♦^"^'^^^i^* iJ) ^ * ♦ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 

*1» * • » o j^P <^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 

-^ Ov <0 ♦ * • <>^ S^ Treatment Date: Sept. 2009 

>^<^v **j^J|j^t ' PreservationTechnologies 

V^ " ^^Ci^^' O * WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

kF ^ x^ ^ "*• ^^^Hy^^ ^ ^ ''"'■' Thomson Park Drive 

^^ ^ "^ ^^'i^m^f^S <U^ Cranberry Township. PA 16066 

'o.»* A <. '^'Trr* <G^ (724)779-2111 





.v^>i«^«.V V - 












O SO" 

















•• .AC' 












